REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN: ON
THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE

With introductory material by
Leonard C. Lewin

The Dial Press, Inc. 1967

New York...

Library of Congress Catalog card
Number 67-27553 Printed in the U.S.

CONTENTS:

Forward -- vii

Background Information -- xvii

Statement by "John Doe" -- xxxi

The Report of the Special Study Group

Letter of Transmittal -- 3

Introduction -- 7

Section 1. Scope of the Study
-- 11

Section 2. Disarmament and the
Economy -- 17

Section 3. Disarmament
Scenarios -- 23

Section 4. War & Peace as
Social Systems -- 27

Section 5. The Functions of
War -- 33

Section 6. Substitutes for the
Functions of War -- 57

Section 7. Summary and
Conclusions -- 79

Section 8. Recommendations --
95

NOTES -- 103

FOREWORD

"John Doe," as I will call him in
this book for reasons that will be made clear, is a professor at a large
university in the Middle West. His field is one of the social sciences,
but I will not identify him beyond this. He telephoned me one evening last
winter, quite unexpectedly; we had not been in touch for several years. He
was in New York for a few days, he said, and there was something important
he wanted to discuss with me. He wouldn't say what it was. We met for
lunch the next day at a midtown restaurant.

He was obviously disturbed. He made small talk
for half an hour, which was quite out of character, and I didn't press
him. Then, apropos of nothing, he mentioned a dispute between a writer and
a prominent political family that had been in the headlines. What, he
wanted to know, were my views on "freedom of information"? How
would I qualify them? And so on. My answers were not memorable, but they
seemed to satisfy him. Then, quite abruptly, he began to tell me the
following story:

Early in August of 1963, he said, he found a
message on his desk that a "Mrs. Potts" had called him from
Washington. When he returned the call, a MAN answered immediately, and
told Doe, among other things, that he had been selected to serve on a
commission "of the highest importance." Its objective was to
determine, accurately and realistically, the nature of the problems that
would confront the United States if and when a condition of
"permanent peace" should arrive, and to draft a program for
dealing with this contingency. The man described the unique procedures
that were to govern the commission's work and that were expected to extend
its scope far beyond that of any previous examination of these problems.

Considering that the caller did not precisely
identify either himself or his agency, his persuasiveness must have been a
truly remarkable order. Doe entertained no serious doubts of the bona
fides of the project, however, chiefly because of his previous experience
with the excessive secrecy that often surrounds quasi-governmental
activities. In addition, the man at the other end of the line demonstrated
an impressively complete and surprisingly detailed knowledge of Doe's work
and personal life. He also mentioned the names of others who were to serve
with the group; most of them were known to Doe by reputation. Doe agreed
to take the assignment --- he felt he had no real choice in the matter ---
and to appear the second Saturday following at Iron Mountain, New York. An
airline ticket arrived in his mail the next morning.

The cloak-and-daggar tone of this convocation
was further enhanced by the meeting place itself. Iron Mountain, located
near the town of Hudson, is like something out of Ian Fleming or
E.Phillips Oppenheim. It is an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of
large American corporations. Most of them use it as an emergency storage
vault for important documents. But a number of them maintain substitute
corporate headquarters as well, where essential personnel could presumably
survive and continue to work after an attack. This latter group includes
such firms as Standard Oil of New Jersey, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and
Shell.

I will leave most of the story of the
operations of the Special Study Group, as the commission was formally
called, for Doe to tell in his own words ("Background
Information"). At this point it is necessary to say only that it met
and worked regularly for over two and a half years, after which it
produced a Report. It was this document, and what to do about it, that Doe
wanted to talk to me about.

The Report, he said, had been suppressed ---
both by the Special Study Group itself and by the government INTERAGENCY
committee to which it had been submitted. After months of agonizing, Doe
had decided that he would no longer be party to keeping it secret. What he
wanted from me was advice and assistance in having it published. He gave
me his copy to read, with the express understanding that if for any reason
I were unwilling to become involved, I would say nothing about it to
anyone else.

I read the Report that same night. I will pass
over my own reactions to it, except to say that the unwillingness of Doe's
associates to publicize their findings became readily understandable. What
had happened was that they had been so tenacious in their determination to
deal comprehensively with the many problems of transition to peace that
the original questions asked of them were never quite answered. Instead,
this is what they concluded:

Lasting peace, while no theoretically
impossible, is probably unattainable; even if it could be achieved it
would almost certainly not be in the best interestes of a stable society
to achieve it.

That is the gist of what they say. Behind their
qualified academic language runs this general argument: War fills certain
functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of
filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained -- and
improved in effectiveness.

It is not surprising that the Group, in its
Letter of Transmittal, did not choose to justify its work to "the lay
reader, unexposed to the exigencies of higher political or military
responsibility." Its Report was addressed, deliberately, to unnamed
government administrators of high rank; it assumed - considerable
politicial sophistication from this select audience. To the general
reader, therefore, the substance of the document may be even more
unsettling than its conclusions. He may not be prepared for some of its
assumptions -- for instance, that most medical advances are viewed more as
problems than as progress; or that poverty is necessary and desirable,
public postures by politicians to the contrary notwithstanding; or that
standing armies are, among other things social-welfare institutions in
exactly the same sense as are old-people's homes and mental hospitals. It
may strike him as odd to find the probably explanation of "flying
saucer" incidents disposed of en passant in less than a sentence. He
may be less surprised to find that the space program and the
"controversial antimissile missile and fallout shelter programs are
understood to have the spending of vast sums of money, not the advancement
of science or national defense, as their principal goals, and to learn
that "military" draft policies are only remotely concerned with
defense.

He may be offended to find the organized
repression of minority groups, and even the reestablishment of slavery,
seriously (and on the whole favorably discussed as possible aspects of a
world at peace. He is not likely to take kindly to the notion of the
deliberate intensification of air and water pollution (as part of a
program leading to peace), even when the reason for considering it is made
clear. That a world without war will have to turn sooner rather than later
to universal test-tube procreation will be less disturbing, if no more
appealing. But few readers will not be taken aback, at least, by a few
lines in th Report's conclusions, repeated in its formal recommendations,
that suggest that the long-range planning--and "budgeting" -- of
the "optimum" number of lives to be destroyed annuallly in overt
warfare is high on the Group's list of priorities for government action.

I cite these few examples primarily to warn the
general reader what he can expect. The statesmen and strategists for whose
eyes the Report was intended obviously need no such protective admonition.

This book, of course, is evidence of my
response to Doe's request. After carefully considering the problems that
might confront the publisher of the Report, we took it to The Dial Press.
There, its significance was immediately recognized, and, more important,
we were given firm assurances that no outside pressures of any sort would
be permitted to interfere with its publication.

It should be made clear that Doe does not
disagree with the substance of the Report, which represents as genuine
consensus in all important respects. He constituted a minority of one --
but only on the issue of disclosing it to the general public. A look at
how the Group dealt with this question will be illuminating

The debate took place at the Group's last full
meeting before the Report was written, late in March, 1966, and again at
Iron Mountain. Two facts must be kept in mind, by way of background. The
first is that the Special Study Group had never been explicitly charged
with or sworn to secrecy, either when it was convened or at any time
thereafter. The second is that the Group had neverthe-less operated as if
it had been. This was assumed from the circumstances of its inception and
from the tone of its instructions. (The Group's acknowledgment of help
from "the many persons....who contributed so greatly to our
work" is somewhat equivocal; these persons were not told the nature
of the project for which their special resources of information were
solicited.)

Those who argued the case for keeping the
Report secret were admittedly motivated by fear of the explosive political
effects that could be expected from publicity. For evidence, they pointed
to the suppression of the far less controversial report of then-Senator
Hubert Humphrey's subcommittee on disarmament in 1962. (Subcommittee
members had reportedly feared that it might be used by Communist
propagandists, as Senator Stuart Symington put it, to "back up the
Marxian theory that was production was the reason for the success of
capitalism.") Similar political precautions had been taken with the
better-known Gaither Report in 1957, and even with the so-called Moynihan
Report in 1965.

Furthermore, they insisted, a distinction must
be made between serious studies, which are normally classified unless and
until policy makers decide to release them, and conventional
"showcase" projects, organized to demonstrate a political
leadership's concerns about an issue and to deflect the energy of those
pressing for action on it. (The example used, because some of the Group
had participated in it, was a "While House Conference" on
intended cooperation, disarmament, etc., which had been staged late in
1965 to offset complaints about escalation of Vietnam War.)

Doe acknowledges this distinction, as well as
the strong possibility of public misunderstanding. But he feels that if
the sponsoring agency had wanted to mandate secrecy it could have done so
at the outset. It could also have assigned the project to one of the
government's established "think tanks," which normally work on a
classified basis. He scoffed at fear of public reaction, which could have
no lasting effect on long-range measures that might be taken to implement
the Group's proposals, and derided the Group's abdication of
responsibility for its opinions and conslusions. So far as he was
concerned, there was such a thing as a public right to know what was being
done on its behalf; the burden of proof was on those who would abridge it.

If my account seems to give Doe the better of
the argument, despite his failure to convince his colleagues, so be it. My
participation in this book testifies that I am not neutral. In my opinion,
the decision of the Special Study Group to censor its own findings was not
merely timid but presumptuos. But the refusal, as of this writing, of the
agencies for which the Report was prepared to release it themselves raises
broader questions of public policy. Such questions center on the
continuing use of self-serve definitions of "security" to avoid
possible political embarrassment. It is ironic how oftern this practice
backfires.

I should state, for the record, that I do not
share the attitudes toward war and peace, life and death, and survival of
the species manifested in the Report. Few readers will. In human terms, it
is an outrageous document. But it does represent a serious and challenging
effort to define an enormous problem. And it explains, or certainly
appears to explain, aspects of American policy otherwise incomprehensible
by the ordinary standards of common sense. What we may think of these
explanations is something else, but it seems to me that we are entitled to
know not only what they are but whose they are.

By "whose" I don't mean merely the
names of the authors of the Report. Much more important, we have a right
to know to what extent their assumptions of social necessity are shared by
the decision-makers in our government. Which do they accept and which do
they reject? However disturbing the answers, only full and frank
discussion offers any conceivable hope of solving the problems raised by
the Special Study Group in their Report from Iron Mountain.

L.C.L. New York June 1967

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

[The following account of the workings of the
Special Study Group is taken verbatim from a series of tape recorded
interviews I had with "John Doe." The transcript has been edited
to minimize the intrusion of my questions and comments, as well as for
length, and the sequence has been revised in the interest of continuity.
L.C.L.]

HOW WAS THE GROUP FORMED?

...The general idea for it, for this kind of
study dates back at least to 1961. It started with some of the new people
who came in with the Kennedy administration, mostly, I think, with
McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk. They were impatient about many things....One of
them was that no really serious work had been done about planning for
peace---a long-range peace, that is, with long- rang planning.

Everything that had been written on the subject
[before 1961] was super- ficial. There was insufficient appreciation of
the scope of the problem. The main reason for this, of course, was that
the idea of a real peace in the world, general disarmament and so on, was
looked on as utopian. Or even crack- pot. This is still true, and it's
easy enough to understand when you look at what's going on in the world
today....It was reflected in the studies that had been made up to that
time. They were not realistic...

The idea of the Special Study, the exact form
it would take, was worked out early in '63...The settlement of the Cuban
missile affair had something to do with it, but what helped most to get it
moving were the big changes in military spending that were being
planned.....Plants being closed, relocations, and so forth. Most of it
wasn't made public until much later....

[I understand] it took a long time to select
the people for the Group. The calls didn't go out until the summer......

WHO MADE THE SELECTION?

That's something I can't tell you. I wasn't
involved with the preliminary planning. The first I knew of it was when I
was called myself. But three of the people had been in on it, and what the
rest of us know we learned from them, about what went on earlier. I do
know that it started very informally. I don't know what particular
government agency approved the project.

WOULD YOU CARE TO MAKE A GUESS?

All right---I think it was an ad hoc committee,
at the cabinet level, or near it. It had to be. I suppose they gave the
organizational job--making arrangements, paying the bills, and so on---to
somebody from the State or Defense of the National Security Council. Only
one of us was in touch with Washington, and I wasn't the one. But I can
tell you that very, very few people knew about us....For instance, there
was the Ackley Committee. It was set up after we were. If you read their
report---the same old tune---economic reconversino, turning sword plants
into plowshare factories...I think you'll wonder if even the President
knew about our Group. The Ackley Committee certainly didn't.

IS THAT POSSIBLE, REALLY? I MEAN THAT NOT EVEN
THE PRESIDENT KNEW OF YOUR COMMISSION?

Well, I don't think there's anything odd about
the government attacking a problem at two different levels. Or even about
two or three [government] agencies working at cross-purposes. It happens
all the time. Perhaps the President did know. And I don't mean to
denigrate the Ackley Committee, but it was exactly that narrowness of
approach that we were supposed to get away from.......

You have to remember -- you've read the
Report---that what they wanted from us was a different kind of thinking.
It was a matter of approach. Herman Kahn calls is
"Byzantine"--no agonizing over cultural and religious values. No
moral posturing. It's the kind of thinking that Rand and the Hudson
Institure and I.D.A. (Institute for Defense Analysis.) brought into war
planning...What they asked up to do, and I think we did it, was to give
the same kind of treat- ment to the hypothetical nuclear war...We may have
gone further than they expected, but once you establish your premises and
your logic you can't turn back....

Kahn's books, for example, are misunderstood,
at least by laymen. They shock people. But you see, what's improtant about
them is not his conclusions, or his opinions. It's the method. He has done
more than anyone else I can think of to get the general public accustomed
to the style of modern military think- ing.....Today it's possible for a
columnist to write about "counterforce strategy" and
"minimum deterrance" and "credible firststrike
capability" with- out having to explain every other word. He can
write about war and strategy without getting bogged down in questions or
morality.......

The other big difference about or work is
breadth. The Report speaks for itself. I can't say that we took every
relevant aspect of life and society into account, but I don't think we
missed anything essential...

WHY WAS THE PROJECT GIVEN TO AN OUTSIDE
COMMISSION? WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN HANDLED BY AN APPROPRIATE GOVERNMENT
AGANCY?

I think that's obvious, or should be. The kind
of thinking wanted from our Group just isn't to be had in a formal
government operation. Too many cont- straints. Too many inhibitions. This
isn't a new problem. Why else would outfits like Rand and Hudson stay in
business? Any assignment that's at all sophisticated is almost always
given to an outside group. This is true even in the State Department, in
the "gray" operations, those that are supposed to be unofficial,
but are really as official as can be. Also with the C.I.A....

For our study, even the private research
centers were too institutional... A lot of thought went into making sure
that our thinking would be unrestricted. All kinds of little things. The
way we were called into the Group, the places we met, all kinds of subtle
devices to remind us. For instance, even our name, the Special Study
Group. You know government names. Wouldn't you think we'd have been called
"Operation Olive Branch," or "Project Pacifica," or
something like that? Nothing like that for us---too allusive, too
suggestive. And no minutes of our meetings---too inhibiting.... About who
might be reading them. Of course, we took notes for our own use. And among
ourselves, we usually called ourselves "The Iron Mountain Boys,"
or "Our Thing," or whatever came to mind........

WHAT CAN YOU TELL ME ABOUT THE MEMBERS OF THE
GROUP?

I'll have to stick to generalities....There
were fifteen of us. The important thing was that we represented a very
wide range of disciplines. And not all academic. People from the natural
sciences, the social sciences, even the humanities. We had a lawyer and a
businessman. Also, a professional war planner. Also, you should know that
everyone in the Group had done work of distinction in at least two
different fields. The interdisciplinary element was built in.....

It's true that there were no women in the
Group, but I don't think that was significant.....We were all American
citizens, of course. And all, I can say, in very good health, at least
when we began.... You see, the first order of business, at the first
meeting, was the reading of dossiers. They were very detailed, and not
just professional, but also personal. They included medical histories. I
remember one very curious thing, for whatever it's worth. Most of us, and
that includes me, had a record of abnormally high uric acid con-
centrations in the blood...... None of us had ever had this experience, of
a public inspection of credentials, or medical reports. It was very
disturbing...

But it was deliberate. The reason for it was to
emphasize that we were supposed to make ALL our own decisions on
procedure, without outside rules. This included judging each other's
qualifications and making allowances for possible bias. I don't think it
affected our work directly, but it made the point it was supposed to
make...... That we should ignore absolutely nothing that might conceivably
affect our objectivity.

[At this point I persuaded Doe that a brief
occupational description of the individual members of the Group would
serve a useful purpose for readers of the Report. The list which follows
was worked out on paper. (It might be more accurate to say it was
negotiated)/. The problem was to give as much relevant information as
possible without violating Doe's commitment to protect his colleagues'
anonymity. It turned out to be very difficult, especially in the cases
of those members who are very well known. For this reason, secondary
areas of achievement or repu- tations are usually not shown.

The simple alphabetical "names"
were assigned by Doe for convenient reference; they bear no intended
relation to actual names. "Able" was the Group's Washington
contact. It was he who brought and read the dossiers, and who most often
acted as chairman. He, "Baker," and "Cox" were the
three who had been involved in the preliminary planning. There is no
other significance to the order of listing.

"Arthus Able" is an historian and
political theorist, who has served in government.

"Bernard Baker: is a professor of
international law and a consultant on government operations.

"Charles Cox" is an economist,
social critic, and biographer.

"John Doe."

"Edward Ellis" is a sociologist
often involved in public affairs.

"Frank Fox" is a cultural
anthropologist.

"George Green" is a psychologist,
educator, and developer of personnel testing systems.

"Harold Hill" is a psychiatrist,
who has conducted extensive studies of the relationship between
individual and group behavior.

"John Jones" is a scholar and
literary critic.

"Martin Miller" is a physical
chemist, whose work has received inter- national recognition at the
highest level.

"Paul Peters" is a biochemist, who
has made important discoveries bearing on reproductive processes.

"Richard Roe" is a mathematician
affiliated with an independent West Coast research institution.

"Samuel Smith" is an astronomer,
physicist, and communications theorist.

"Thomas Taylor" is a systems
analyst and war planner, who has written extensively on war, peace, and
international relations.

"William White" is an
industrialist, who has undertaken many special government assignments.]

HOW DID THE GROUP OPERATE? I MEAN, WHERE AND
WHEN DID YOU MEET, AND SO FORTH?

We met on the average of once a month. Usually
it was on weekends, and usually for two days. We had a few longer
sessions, and one that lasted only four hours. .... We met all over the
country, always at a different place, except for the first and last times,
which were at Iron Mountain. It was like a traveling seminar....Sometimes
at hotels, sometimes at universities. Twice we met at summer camps, and
once at a private estate, in Virginia. We used a business place in
Pittsburgh, and another in Poughkeepsie, [New York]....We never met in
Washington, or on government property anywhere....Able would announce the
times and places two meetings ahead. They were never changed.....

We didn't divide into subcommittees, or
anything else that formal. But we all took individual assignments between
meetings. A lot of it involved getting information from other people....
Among the fifteen of us, I don't thing there was anybody in the academic
or professional world we couldn't call on if we wanted to, and we took
advantage of it..... We were paid a very modest per diem. All of it was
called "expenses" on the vouchers. We were told not to report it
on our tax returns.... The checks were drawn on a special account of
Able's at a New York bank. He signed them....I don't know what the study
cost. So far as our time and travel were concerned, it couldn't have come
to more than the low six-figure range. But the big item must have been
computer time, and I have no idea how high this ran......

YOU SAY THAT YOU DON'T THINK YOUR WORK WAS
AFFECTED BY PROFESSIONAL BIAS. WHAT ABOUT POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL
BIAS? IS IT POSSIBLE TO DEAL WITH QUESTIONS OF WAR AND PEACE WITHOUT
REFLECTING PERSONAL VALUES?

Yes, it is. I can understand your skepticism.
But if you had been at any of our meetings you'd have had a very hard time
figuring out who were the liberals and who were the conservatives, or who
were hawks and who were doves. There IS such a thing as objectivity, and I
think we had it... I don't say no one had any emotional reaction to what
we were doing. We all did, to some extent. As a matter of fact, two
members had heart attacks after we were finished, and I'll be the first to
admit it probably wasn't a coincidence.

YOU SAID YOU MADE UP YOUR OWN GROUND RULES.
WHAT WERE THESE GROUND RULES?

The most important were informality and
unanimity . By informality I mean that our discussions were open-ended. We
went as far afield as any one of us thought we had to. For instance, we
spent a lot of time on the relationship between military recruitment
policies and industrial employment. Before we were finished with it, we'd
gone through the history of western penal codes and any number of
comparative psychiatric studies [of draftees and volunteers]. We looked
over the organization of the Inca empire. We determined the effects of
automation on underdeveloped societies....It was all relevant....

By unanimity, I don't mean that we kept taking
votes, like a jury. I mean that we stayed with every issue until we had
what the Quakers call a "sense of the meeting." It was
time-consuming. But in the long run it saved time. Eventually we all got
on the same wavelength, so to speak.....

Of course we had differences, and big ones,
especially in the beginning... For instance, in Section I you might think
we were merely clarifying our instructions. Not so; it took a long time
before we all agreed to a strict interpretation.... Roe and Taylor deserve
most of the credit for this... There are many things in the Report that
look obvious now, but didn't seem so obvious then. For instance, on the
relationship of war to social systems. The original premise was
conventional, from Clausewitz. .... That war was an "instrument"
of broader political values. Able was the only one who challenged this, at
first. Fox called his position "perverse." Yet it was Fox who
furnished most of the data that led us all to agree with Able eventually.
I mention this be- cause I think it's a good example of the way we worked.
A triumph of method over cliche...... I certainly don't intend to go into
details about who took what side about what, and when. But I will say, to
give credit where due, that only Roe, Able, Hill and Taylor were able to
see, at the beginning, where our method was taking us.

BUT YOU ALWAYS REACHED AGREEMENT, EVENTUALLY?

Yes. It's a unanimous report... I don't mean
that our sessions were always harmonious. Some of them were rough. The
last six months there was a lot of quibbling about small points... We'd
been under pressure for a long time, we'd been working together too long.
It was natural.....that we got on each other's nerves. For a while Able
and Taylor weren't speaking to each other. Miller threatened to quit. But
this all passed. There were no important differences...

HOW WAS THE REPORT ACTUALLY WRITTEN? WHO DID
THE WRITING?

We all had a hand in the first draft. Jones and
Able put it together, and then mailed it around for review before working
out a final version... The only problems were the form it should take and
whom we were writing it for. And, of course, the question of
disclosure.... [Doe's comments on this point are summarized in the
introduction.]

YOU MENTIONED A "PEACE GAMES"
MANUAL. WHAT ARE PEACE GAMES?

I wanted to say something about that. The
Report barely mentions it. "Peace games" is a method we
developed during the course of the study. It's a forecasting technique, an
information system. I'm very excited about it. Even if nothing is done
about our recommendations--which is conceivable--this is something that
can't be ignored. It will revolutionize the study of social problems. It's
a by-product of the study. We needed a fast, dependable procedure to
approximate the effects of disparate social phenomena on other social
phenomena. We got it. It's in a primitive phase, but it works.

HOW ARE PEACE GAMES PLAYED? ARE THEY LIKE
RAND'S WAR GAMES?

You don't "play" peace games, like
chess or Monopoly, any more than you play war games with toy soldiers. You
use computers. It's a programming system. A computer "language,"
like Fortran, or Algol, or Jovial.... Its advantage is its superior
capacity to interrelate data with no apparent common points of
reference.... A simple analogy is likely to be misleading. But I can give
you some examples. For instance, supposing I asked you to figure out what
effect a moon landing by U.S. astronauts would have on an election in,
say, Sweden. Or what effect a change in the draft law--a specific
change--would have on the value of real estate in downtown Manhattan? Or a
certain change in college entrance requirements in the United States on
the British shipping industry?

You would probably say, first, that there would
be no effect to speak of, and second, that there would be no way of
telling. But you'd be wrong on both counts. In each case there would be an
effect, and the peace games method could tell you what it would be,
quantitatively. I didn't take these examples out of the air. We used them
in working out the method....Essentiallly, it's an elaborate high-speed
trial-and-error system for determining working algorithms. Like most
sophisticated types of computer problem-solving...

A lot of the "games" of this kind you
read about are just glorified and conversational exercises. They really
are games, and nothing more. I just saw one reported in the Canadian
Computer Society Bulletin, called a "Vietnam Peace Game." They
use simulation techniques, but the programming hypotheses are
speculative....

The idea of a problem-solving system like this
is not original with us. ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of
the Department of Defense DoD.) has been working on something like it. So
has General Electric, in California. There are others..... We were
successful not because we know more than they do about programming, which
we don't, but because we leaned how to formulate the problems accurately.
It goes back to the old saw. You can always find the answer if you know
the right question.....

SUPPOSING YOU HADN'T DEVELOPED THIS METHOD.
WOULD YOU HAVE COME TO THE SAME CONCLUSIONS IN THE REPORT?

Certainly. But it would have taken many times
longer..But please don't misunderstand my enthusiasm [about the peace
games method]. With all due respect to the effects of computer technology
on modern thinking, basic judgments must still be made by human beings.
The peace games technique isn't responsible for our Report. We are.

STATEMENT BY "JOHN DOE"

Contrary to the decision of the Special Study
Group, of which I was a member, I have arranged for the general release of
our Report. I am grateful to Mr. Leonard C. Lewin for his invaluable
assistance in making this possible, and to The Dial Press for accepting
the challenge of publication. Responsibility for taking this step,
however, is mine and mine alone.

I am well aware that my action may be taken as
a breach of faith by some of my former colleagues. But in my view my
responsibility to the society for which I am a part supersedes any
self-assumed obligation on the part of fifteen individual men. Since our
Report can be considered on its merits, it is not necessary for me to
disclose their identity to accomplish my purpose. Yet I gladly abandon my
own anonymity it is were possible to do so without at the same time
comprising theirs, to defend our work publicly if and when they release me
from this personal bond.

But this is secondary. What is needed now, and
needed badly, is widespread public discussion and debate about the
elements of war and the problems of peace. I hope that publication of this
Report will serve to initiate it.

THE REPORT OF THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP

LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL

To the convener of this Group:

Attached is the Report of the Special Study
Group established by you in August, 1963, 1) to consider the problems
involved in the contigency of a transition to a general condition of
peace, and 2) to recommend procedures for dealing with this contingency.
For the covenience of nontechnical readers we have elected to submit our
statistical supporting data, totaling 604 exhibits, separately, as well as
a preliminary manual of the "peace games" method devised during
the course of our study.

We have compelted our assignment to the best of
our ability, subject to the limitations of time and resources available to
us. Our conclusions of fact and our recommendations are unanimous; those
of use who differ in certain secondary respects from the findings set
forth herein do not consider these differences sufficient to warrant the
filing of a minority report. It is our earnest hope that the fruits of our
deliberations will be of value to our government in its efforts to provide
leadership to the nation in solving the complex and far-reaching problems
we have examined, and that our recommendations for subsequent Presidential
action in this area will be adopted.

Because of the unusual circumstances
surrounding the establishment of this Group, and in view of the nature of
its findings, we do not recommend that this Report be released for
publication. It is our affirmative judgment that such action would not be
in the public interest. The uncertain advantages of public discussion of
our conclusions and recommendations are, in our opinion, greatly
outweighed by the clear and predictable danger of a crisis in public
confidence which untimely publication of this Report might be expected to
provoke. The likelihood that a lay reader, unexposed to the exigencies of
higher political or military responsibility, will misconstrue the purpose
of this project, and the intent of its participants, seems obvious. We
urge that circulation of this Report be closely restricted to those whose
responsibilities require that they be apprised of its contents.

We deeply regret that the necessity of
anonymity, a prerequisite to our Group's unhindered pursuit of its
objectives, precludes proper acknowledgment of our gratitude to the many
persons in and out of government who contributed so greatly to our work.

FOR THE SPECIAL STUDY GROUP

[signature withheld for publication]

30 SEPTEMBER, 1966

INTRODUCTION

The Report which follows summarizes the results
of a two-and-a-half-year study of the broad problems to be anticipated in
the event of general trans- formation of American society to a condition
lacking its most critical current characteristics: its capability and
readiness to make war when doing so is judged necessary or desirable by
its political leadership.

Our work has been predicated on the belief that
some kind of general peace may soon be negotiable. The de facto admission
of Communist China into the United Nations now appears to be only a few
years away at most. It has become increasinly manifest that conflicts of
American national interest with those of China and the Soviet Union are
susceptible of political solution, despite the superficial
contraindictions of the current Vietnam war, of the threats of an attack
on China, and of the necessarily hostile tenor of day-to-day foreign
policy statements. It is also obvious that differences involving other
nations can be readily resolved by the three great powers whenever they
arrive at a stable peace among themselves. It is not necessary, for the
purposes of our study, to assume that a general detente of this sort will
come about---and we make no such argument--but only that it may.

It is surely no exaggeration to say that a
condition of general world peace would lead to changes in the social
structures of the nations of the world of unparalleled and revolutionary
magnitude. The economic impact of general disarmament, to name only the
most obvious consequence of peace, would revise the production and
distribution patterns of the globe to a degree that would make changes of
the past fifty years seem insignificant. Political, sociological,
cultural, and ecological changes would be equally far-reaching. What has
motivated our study of these contingencies has been the growing sense of
thoughtful men in and out of government that the world is totally
unprepared to meet the demands of such a situation.

We had originally planned, when our study was
initiated, to address ourselves to these two broad questions and their
components: What can be expected if peace comes? What should we be
prepared to do about it? But as our investigation proceeded, it became
apparent that certain other questions had to be faced. What, for instance,
are the real functions of war in modern societies, beyond the ostensible
ones of defending and advancing the "national interests" of
nations? In the absence of war, what other institutions exist or might be
devised to fulfill these functions? Granting that a "peaceful"
settlement of disputes is within the range of current international
relationships, is the abolition of war, in the broad sense, really
possible? If so, is it necessarily desirable, in terms of social
stability? If not, what can be done to improve the operation of our social
system in respect to its war-readiness?

The word peace, as we have used it in the
following pages, describes a permanent, or quasi-permanent, condition
entirely free from the national exercise, or contemplation, of any form of
the organized social violence, or threat of violence, generally known as
war. It implies total and general disarmament. It is not used to describe
the more familiar condition of "cold war," "armed
peace," or other mere respite, long or short, from armed conflict.
Nor is it used simply as a synonym for the political settlement of
international differences. The magnitude of modern means of mass
destruction and the speed of modern communications require the unqualified
working definition given above; only a generation ago such an absolute
description would have seemd utopian rather than pragmatic. Today, any
modification of this definition would render it almost worthless for our
purpose. By the same standard, we have used the work war to apply
interchangeably to conventional ("hot") war, to the general
condition of war preparation or war readiness, and to the general
"war system." The sense intended is made clear in context.

The first section of our Report deals with its
scope and with the assumptions on which our study was based. The second
considers the effects of disarmament on the economy, the subject of most
peace research to date. The third takes up so-called "disarmament
scenarios" which have been proposed. The fourth, fifth, and sixth
examine the nonmilitary functions of war and the problems they raise for a
viable transition to peace; here will be found some indications of the
true dimensions of the problem, not previously coordinated in any other
study. In the seventh section we summarize our findings, and in the eight
we set forth our recommendations for what we believe to be a practical and
necessary course of action.

SECTION 1 - SCOPE OF THE STUDY

When The Special Study Group was established in
August, 1963, its members were instructed to govern their deliberations in
accordance with three principal criteria. Briefly stated, they were these:
1) military-style objectivity; 2) avoidance of preconceived value
assumptions; 3) inclusion of all revelant areas of theory and data.

These guideposts are by no means as obvious as
they may appear at first glance, and we believe it necessary to indicate
clearly how they were to inform our work. For they express succinctly the
limitations of previous "peace studies," and imply the nature of
both government and unofficial dissatisfaction with these earlier efforts.
It is not our intention here to minimize the significance of the work of
our predecessors, or to belittle the quality of their contributions. What
we have tried to do, and believe we have done, is extend their scope. We
hope that our conclusions may serve in turn as a starting point for still
broader and more detailed examinations of every aspect of the problems of
transition to peace and of the questions which must be answer- ed before
such a transition can be allowed to get under way.

It is a truism that objectivity is more often
an intention expressed than an attitude achieved, but the
intention---conscious, unambiguous, and constantly self-critical -- is a
precondition to its achievement. We believe it no accident that we were
charged to use a "military contingency" model for our study, and
we owe a considerable debt to the civilian war planning agencies for their
pioneering work in the objective examination of the contingencies of
nuclear war. There is no such precedent in the peace studies. Much of the
usefulness of even the most elaborate and carefully reasoned programs for
economic conversion to peace, for example, has been vitiated by a wishful
eagerness to demonstrate that peace is not only possible, but even cheap
or easy. One official report is replete with references to the critical
role of "dynamic optimism" on economic developments, and goes on
to submit, as evidence, that it "would be hard to imagine that the
American people would not respond very positively to an agreed and
safeguarded program to substitute an internatinal rule of law and
order," etc. Anothe line of argument frequently taken is that
disarmament would entail comparatively little disruption of the economy,
since it need only be partial; we will deal with this approach later. Yet
genuine objectivity in war studies is often critized as inhuman. As Herman
Kahn, the writer on strategic studies best known to the general public,
put it: "Critics frequently object to the icy rationality of the
Hudson Institute, the Rand Corporation, and other such organizations. I'm
always tempted to ask in reply, `Would you prefer a warm, human error? Do
you feel better with a nice emotional mistake.'" And, as Secretary of
Defense Robert S. McNamara has pointed out, in reference to facing up to
the possibility of nuclear war, "Some people are afraid even to look
over the edge. But in a thermonuclear war we cannot afford any political
acrophobia." Surely it would be self-evident that this applies
equally to the opposite prospect, but so far no one has taken more than a
timid glance over the brink of peace.

An intention to avoid preconceived value
judgments is if anything even more productive of self-delusion. We claim
no immunity, as individuals, from this type of bias, but we have made a
continuously self-conscious effort to deal with the problems of peace
without, for exampel, considering that a condition of peace is per se
"good" or "bad." This has not been easy, but it has
been obligatory; to our knowledge, it has not been done before. Previous
studies have taken the desirability of peace, the importance of human
life, the superiority of democratic institutions, the greatest
"good" for the greatest number, the "dignity" of the
individual, the desirability of maximum health and longevity, and other
such wishful premises as axiomatic values necessary for the justification
of a study of peace issues. We have not found them so. We have attempted
to apply the standards of physical science to our thinking, the principal
characteristic of which is not quantification, as is popularly believd,
but that, in Whitehead's words, "...it ignores all judgments of
value; for instance, all esthetic and moral judgments." Yet it is
obvious that any serious investigation of a problem, however
"pure," must be informed by some normative standard. In this
case it has been simply the survival of human society in general, of
Amerian society in particular, and, as a corollary to survival, the
stability of this society.

It is interesting, we believe, to note that the
most dispassionate planners of nuclear strategy also recognize that the
stability of society is the one bedrock value that cannot be avoided.
Secretary McNamara has defended the need for American nuclear superiority
on the grounds that it "makes possible a strategy designed to
preserve the fabric of our societies if war should occur." A former
member ofthe Department of State policy planning staff goes further.
"A more precise word for peace, in terms of the practical world, is
stability. ... Today the great nuclear panoplies are essential elements in
such stability as exists. Our present purpose must be to continue the
process of learning how to live with them." We, of course, do not
equate stability with peace, but we accept it as the one common assumed
objective of both peace and war.

The third criterion-breadth-has taken us still
farther afield from peace studies made to date. It is obvious to any
layman that the economic patterns of a warless world will be drastically
different from those we live with today, and it is equally obvious that
the political relationships of nations will not be those we have learned
to take for granted, sometimes described as a global version of the
adversary system of our common law. But the social implications of peace
extend far beyond its putative effects on national economics and
international relations. As we shall show, the relevance of peace and war
to the internal political organization of societies, to the sociological
relationships of their members, to psychological motivations, to
ecological processes, and to cultural values is equally profound. More
important, it is equally critical in assaying the consequences of a
transition to peace, and in deter- mining the feasibility of any
transition at all.

It is not surprising that these less obvious
factors have been generally ignored in peace research. They have not lent
themselves to systematic analysis. They have been difficult, perhaps
impossible, to measure with any degree of assurance that estimates of
their effects could be depended on. They are "intangibles," but
only in the sense that abstract concepts in mathematics are intangible
compared to those which can be quantified. Economic factors, on the other
hand, can be measured, at least superficialy; and international
relationships can be verbalized, like law, into logical sequences.

We do not claim that we have discovered an
infallible way of measuring these other factors, or of assigning them
precise weights in the equation of transition. But we believe we have
taken their relative importance into account to this extent: we have
removed them from the category of the "intangible," hence
scientifically suspect and therefore somehow of secondary importance, and
brought them out into the realm of the objective. The result, we believe,
provides a context of realism for the discussion of the issues relating to
the possible transition to peace which up to now has been missing.

This is not to say that we presume to have
found the answers we were seeking. But we believe that our emphasis on
breadth of scope has made it at least possible to begin to understand the
questions.

SECTION 2 - DISARMAMENT AND THE ECONOMY

In this section we shall briefly examine some
of the common features of the studies that have been published dealing
with one or another aspect of the expected impact of disarmament on the
American economy. Whether disarmament is considered as a by-product of
peace or as its precondition, its effect on the national economy will in
either case be the most immediately felt of its consequences. The quasi-mensurable
quality of economic manifestations has given rise to more detailed
speculation in this area than in any other.

General agreement prevails in respect to the
more important economic problems that general disarmament would raise. A
short survey of these problems, rather than a detailed critique of their
comparative significance, is sufficient for our purposes in this Report.

The first factor is that of size. The
"world war industry," as one writer has aptly caled it, accounts
for approximately a tenth of the output of the world's total economy.
Although this figure is subject to fluctuation, the causes of which are
themselves subject to regional variation, it tends to hold fairly steady.
The United States, as the world's richest nation, not only accounts for
the largest single share of this expense, currently upward of $60 billion
a year, but also "...has devoted a higher proportion [emphasis added]
of its gross national product to its military establishment than any other
major free world nation. This was true even before our increased
expenditures in Southeast Asia." Plans for economic conversion that
minimize the economic magnitude of the problem do so only by
rationalizing, however persuasively, the maintenance of a substantial
residual military budget under some euphemized classification.

Conversion of military expenditures to other
purposes entails a number of difficulties. The most serious stems from the
degree of rigid specialization that characterizes modern war production,
best exemplified in nuclear and missile technology. This constituted no
fundamental problem after World War II, nor did the question of
free-market consumer demand for "conventinal" items of
consumption---those good and services consumers had already been
conditioned to require. Today's situation is qualitatively different in
both respects.

This inflexibility is geographical and
occupational, as well as industrial, a fact which has led most analysts of
the economic impact of disarmament to focus their attention on phased
plans for the relocation of war industry personnel and capital
installations as much as on proposals for developing new patterns of
consumption. One serious flaw common to such plans is the kind called in
the natural sciences the "macroscopic error." An implicit
presumption is made that a total national plan for conversion differs from
a community program to cope with the shutting down of a "defense
facility" only in degree. We find no reason to believe that this is
the case, nor that a general enlargement of such local programs, however
well thought out in terms of housing, occupational retraining, and the
like, can be applied on a national scale. A national economy can absorb
amost any number of subsidiary reorganizations within its total limits,
providing there is no basic change in its own structure. General
disarmament, which would require such basic changes, lends itself to no
valid smaller-scale analogy.

Even more questionable are the models proposed
for the retaining labor for nonarmaments occupations. Putting aside for
the moment the unsolved questions dealing with the nature of new
distribution patterns---retraining for what?-- the increasingly
specialized job skills associated with war industry production are further
depreciated by the accelerating inroads of the industrial techniques
loosely described as "automation." It is not too much to say
that general disarmament would require the scrapping of a critical
proportion of the most highly developed occupational specialites in the
economy. The political difficulties inherent in such an
"adjustment" would make the outcries resulting from the closing
of a few obsolete military and naval installatins in 1964 sound like a
whisper.

In general, discussions of the problem of
conversion have been characterized by an unwillingness to recognize its
special quality. This is best ecemplified by the 1965 report of the Ackley
Committee. One critic has tellingly pointed out that it blindly assumes
that "...nothing in the arms economy--neither its size, nor its
geographical concentration, nor its highly specialized nature, nor the
peculiarties of its market, nor the special nature of much of its labor
force---endows it with any uniqueness when the necessary time of
adjustment comes."

Let us assume, however, despite the lack of
evidence that a viable program for conversion can be developed in the
framework of the existing economy, that the problems noted above can be
solved. What proposals have been offered for utilizing the productive
capabilities that disarmament would presumably release?

The most common held theory is simply that
general economic reinvestment would absorb the greater part of these
capabilities. Even though it is now largely taken for granted (and even by
today's equivalent of traditional laissez-faire economists) taht
unprecedented government assistance (and con- comitant government control)
will be needed to solve the "structural" problems of transition,
a general attitude of confidence prevails that new consumption patterns
will take up the slack. What is less clear is the nature of these
patterns.

One school of economists has it that these
patterns will develop on their own. It envisages the equivalent of the
arms budget being returned, under careful control, to the consumer, in the
form of tax cuts. Another, recognizing the undeniable need for increased
"consumption" in what is generally considered the public sector
of the economy, stresses vastly increased government spending in such
areas of national concern as health, education, mass transportation,
low-cost housing, water supply, control of the physical environment, and,
stated generally, "poverty."

The mechanisms proposed for controlling the
transition to an arms-free economy are also traditional--changes in both
sides of the federal budget, manipulation of interest rates, etc. We
acknowledge the undeniable value of fiscal tools in a normal cyclical
economy, where they provide leverage to accelerate or brake an existing
trend. Their more committed proponents, however, tend to lose sight of the
fact that there is a limit to the power of these devices to influence
fundamental economic forces. They can provide new incentives in the
economy, but they cannot in themselves transform the production of a
billion dollars' worth of missiles a year to the equivalent in food,
clothing, prefabricated houses, or television sets. At bottom, they
reflect the economy; they do not motivate it.

More sophisticated, and less sanguine, analysts
contemplate the diversion of the arms budget to a non-military system
equally remote from the market economy. What the
"pyramid-builders" frequently suggest is the expansion of
space-research programs to the dollar level of current expenditures. This
approach has the superficial merit of reducing the size of the problem of
transferability of resources, but introduces other difficulties, which we
will take up in section 6.

Without singling out any one of the several
major studies of the expected impact of disarmament on the economy for
special criticism, we can summarize our objections to them in general
terms as follows:

No proposed program for economic conversion
to disarmament sufficiently takes into account the unique magnitude of
the required adjustments it would entail.

Proposals to transform arms production into
a beneficent scheme of public works are more the products of wishful
thinking than of realistic understanding of the limits of our existing
economic system.

Fiscal and monetary measures are inadequate
as controls for the process of transition to an arms-free economy.

Insufficient attention has been paid to the
political acceptability of the objectives of the proposed conversion
models, as well as of the political means to be employed in
effectuating a transition.

No serious consideration has been given, in
any proposed conversion plan, to the fundamental nonmilitary function
of war and armaments in modern society, nor has any explicit attempt
been made to devise a viable substitute for it. This criticism will be
developed in sections 5 and 6.

SECTION 3 - DISARMAMENT SCENARIOS

SCENARIOS, as they have come to be called, are
hypothetical constructions of future events. Inevitably, they are composed
of varying proportions of established fact, reasonable inference, and more
or less inspired guesswork. Those which have been suggested as model
procedures for effectuating international arms control and eventual
disarmament are necessarily imaginative, although closely reasoned; in
this respect they resemble the "war games" analyses of the Rand
Corporation, with which they share a common conceptual origin.

All such scenarios that have been seriously put
forth imply a dependence on bilateral or multilateral agreement between
the great powers. In general, they call for a progressive phasing out of
gross armaments, military forces, weapons, and weapons technology,
coordinated with elaborate matching procedures of verification,
inspection, and machinery for the settlement of international disputes. It
should be noted that even proponents of unilateral disarmament qualify
their proposals with an implied requirement of reciprocity, very much in
the manner of a scenario of graduated response in nuclear war. The
advantage of unilateral initiative lies in its political value as an
expression of good faith, as well as in its diplomatic function as a
catalyst for formal disarmament negotiations.

The READ model for disarmament (developed by
the Research Program on Economic Adjustments to Disarmament) is typical of
these scenarios. It is a twelve-year program, divided into three-year
stages. Each stage includes a separate phase of: reduction of armed
forces; cutbacks of weapons production, inventories, and foreign military
bases; development of international inspection procedures and control
conventiona; and the building up of a sovereign international disarmament
organization. It anticipates a net matching decline in U.S. defense
expenditures of only somewhat more than half the 1965 level, but a
necessary redeployment of some five-sixths of the defense-dependent labor
force.

The economic implications assigned by their
authors to various disarmament scenarios diverge widely. The more
conservative models, like that cited above, emphasize economic as well as
military prudence in postulating elaborate fail-safe disarmament agencies,
which themselves require expenditures substantially substituting for those
of the displaced war industries. Such programs stress the advantages of
the smaller economic adjustment entailed. Others emphasize, on the
contrary, the magnitude (and the opposite advantages) of the savings to be
achieved from disarmament. One widely read analysis estimates the annual
cost of the inspection function of general disarmament throughout the
world as only between two and three percent of current military
expenditures. Both types of plan tend to deal with the anticipated problem
of economic reinvestment only in the aggregate. We have seen no proposed
disarmament sequence that correlates the phasing out of specific kinds of
military spending with specific new forms of substitute spending.

Without examining disarmament scenarios in
greater detail, we may characterize them with these general comments:

Given genuine agreement of intent among the
great powers, the scheduling of arms control and elimination presents
no inherently insurmountable procedural problems. Any of several
proposed sequences might serve as the basis for multilateral agreement
or for the first step in unilateral arms reduction.

No major power can proceed with such a
program, however, until it has developed an economic conversion plan
fully integrated with each phase of disarmament. No such plan has yet
been developed in the United States.

Furthermore, disarmament scenarios, like
proposals for economic conversion, make no allowance for the
non-military functions of war in modern societies, and offer no
surrogate for these necessary functions. One partial exception is a
proposal for the "unarmed forces of the United States,"
which we will consider in section 6.

SECTION 4 - WAR AND PEACE AS SOCIAL SYSTEMS

We have dealt only sketchily with proposed
disarmament scenarios and economic analyses, but the reason for our
seemingly casual dismissal of so much serious and sophisticated work lies
in no disrespect for its competence. It is rather a question of relevance.
To put it plainly, all these programs, however detailed and well
developed, are abstractions. The most carefully reasoned disarmament
sequence inevitably reads more like the rules of a game or a classroom
exercise in logic than like a prognosis of real events in the real world.
This is as true of today's complex proposals as it was of the Abbe de St.
Pierre's "Plane for Perpetual Peace in Eurpope" 250 years ago.

Some essential element has clearly been lacking
in all these schemes. One of our first tasks was to try to bring this
missing quality into definable focus, and we believe we have succeeded in
doing so. We find that at the heart of every peace study we have
examined--from the modest technoligical proposal (e.g., to convert a
poison gas plant to the production of "socially useful"
equivalents) to the most eleborate scenario for universal peace in out
time--lies one common fundamental misconception. It is the source of the
miasma of unreality surrounding such plans. It is the incorrect assumption
that war, as an institution, is subordinate to the social systems it is
believed to serve.

This misconceptino, although profound and
far-reaching, is entirely comprehensible. Few social cliches are so
unquestioningly accepted as the notion that war is an extension of
diplomacy (or of politics, or of the pursuit of economic objectives). If
this were true, it would be wholly appropriate for economists and
political theorists to look on the problems of transition to peace as
essentially mechanical or procedural---as indeed they do, treating them as
logistic corollaries of the settlement of national conflicts of interest.
If this were true, there would be no real substance to the difficulties of
transition. For it is evident that even in today's world there exist no
conceivable conflict of interest, real or imaginary, between nations or
between social forces within nations, that cannot be resolved without
recourse to war--if such resolution were assigned a priority of social
value. And if this were true, the economic analyses and disarmament
proposals we have referred to, plausible and well conceived as they may
be, would not inspire, as they do, an inescapable sense of indirection.

The point is that the cliche is not true, and
the problems of transition are indeed substantive rather than merely
procedural. Although was is "used" as an instrument of national
and social policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of
readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure. War
itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of
social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has
governed most human societies of record, as it is today.

Once this is correctly understood, the true
magnitude of the problems entailed in a transition to peace---itself a
social system, but without precedent except in a few simple preindustrial
societies---becomes apparent. At the same time, some of the puzzling
superficial contradictions of modern societies can then be readily
rationalized. The "unnecessary" size and power of the world war
industry; the preeminence of the military establishment in every society,
whether open or concealed; the exemption of military or paramilitary
institutions from the accepted social and legal standards of behavior
required elsewhere in the society; the successful operation of the armed
forces and the armaments producers entirely outside the framework of each
nation's economic ground rules: these and other ambiquities closely
associated with the relationship of war to society are easily clarified,
once the priority of war-making potential as the principal structuring
force in society is accepted. Economic systems, political philosophies,
and corpora jures serve and extend the war system, not vice versa.

It must be emphasized that the precedence of a
society's war-making potential over its other characteristics is not the
result of the "threat" presumed to exist at any one time from
other societies. This is the reverse of the basic situation; "threath"
against the "national interest" are usually created or
accelerated to meet the changing needs of the war system. Only in
comparatively recent times has it been considered politically expedient to
euphemize war budgets as "defense" requirements. The necessity
for governments to dis- tinguish between "aggression" (bad) and
"defense" (good) has been a by-product of rising literacy and
rapid communication. The distinction is tactical only, a concession to the
growing inadequacy of ancient war-organizing political rationales.

Wars are not "caused" by
international conflicts of interest. Proper logical sequence would make it
more often accurate to say that war-making societies require---and thus
bring about---such conflicts. The capacity of a nation to make war
expresses the greatest social power it can exercise; war-making, active or
contemplated, is a matter of life and death on the greatest scale subject
to social control. It should therefore hardly be surprising that the
military institutions in each society claim its highest priorities.

We find further that most of the confusion
surrounding the myth that war-making is a tool of state policy stems from
a general misapprehension of the functions of war. In general, these are
conceived as: to defend a nation from military attack by another, or to
deter such an attack; to defend or advance a "national
interest"--economic, political, idealogical; to maintain or in-
crease a nation's military power for its own sake. These are the visible,
or ostensible, functions of war. If there were no others, the importance
of the war establishment in each society might in fact decline to the
subordinate level it is believed to occupy. And the elimination of war
would indeed be the procedural matter that the disarmament scenarios
suggest.

But there are other, broader, more profoundly
felt functions of war in modern societies. It is these invisivle, or
implied, functions that maintain war-readiness as the dominant force in
our societies. And it is the unwillingness or inability of the writers of
disarmament scenarios and reconversion plans to take them into account
that has so reduced the usefulness of their work, and that has made it
seem unrelated to the world we know.

SECTION 5 - THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR

As we have indicated, the preeminence of the
concept of war as the principal organizing force in most societies has
been insufficiently appreciated. This is also true of its extensive
effects throughout the many nonmilitary activities of society. These
effects are less apparent in complex industrial socie- ties like our own
than in primitive cultures, the activities of which can be more easily and
fully comprehended.

We propose in this section to examine these
nonmilitary, implied, and usually invisible functions of war, to the
extent that they bear on the problems of transition to peace for our
society. The military, or ostensible, function of the war system requires
no elaboration; it serves simply to defend or advance the "national
interest" by means of organized violence. It is often necessary for a
national military establishment to create a need for its unique powers--to
maintain the franchise, so to speak. And a healthy military apparatus
requires "exercise," by whatever rationale seems expedient, to
prevent its atrophy.

The nonmilitary functions of the war system are
more basic. They exist not merely to justify themselves but to serve
broader social purposes. If and when war is eliminated, the military
functions it has served will end with it. But its nonmilitary functions
will not. It is essential, therefore, that we understand their
significance before we can reasonably expect to evaluate whatever
institutions may be proposed to replace them.

ECONOMIC

The production of weapons of mass destruction
has always been associated with economic "waste." The term is
pejorative, since it implies a failure of function. But no human activity
can properly be considered wasteful if it achieves its contextual
objective. The phrase "wasteful but necessary," applied not only
to war expenditures but to most of the "unproductive" commercial
activities of our society, is a contradiction in terms. "...The
attacks that have since the time of Samuel's criticism of King Saul been
leveled against military expenditures as waste may well have concealed or
misunderstood the point that some kinds of waste may have a larger social
utility."

In the case of military "waste,"
there is indeed a larger social utility. It derives from the fact that the
"wastefulness" of war production is exercised entirely outside
the framework of the economy of supply and demand. As such, it provides
the only critically large segment of the total economy that is subject to
complete and arbitrary central control. If modern industrial societies can
be defined as those which have developed the capacity to produce more than
is required for their economic survival (regardless of the equities of
distribution of goods within them), military spending can be said to
furnish the only balance wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the
advance of their economies. The fact that war is "wasteful" is
what enables it to serve this function. And the faster the economy
advances, the heavier this balance wheel must be.

This function is often viewed, oversimply, as a
device for the control of surpluses. One writer on the subject puts it
this way: "Why is war so wonderful? Because it creates artificial
demand...the only kind of artificial demand, moreover, that does not raise
any political issues: war, and only war, solves the problem of
inventory." The reference here is to shooting war, but it applies
equally to the general war economy as well. "It is generally
agreed," concludes, more cautiously, the report of a panel set up by
the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, "that the greatly
expanded public sector since World War II, resulting from heavy defense
expenditures, has provided additional protection against depressions,
since this sector is not responsive to con- traction in the private sector
and has provided a sort of buffer or balance wheel in the economy."

The principal economic function of war, in our
view, is that it provides just such a flywheel. It is not to be confused
in function with the various forms of fiscal control, none of which
directly engages vast numbers of control, none of which directly engages
vast numbers of men and units of production. It is not to be confused with
massive government expenditures in social welfare programs; once
initiated, such programs normally become integral parts of the general
economy and are no longer subject to arbitrary control.

But even in the context of the general civilian
economy war cannot be considered wholly "wasteful." Without a
long-established war economy, and without its frequent eruption into
large-scale shooting war, most of the major industrial advances known to
history, beginning with the development of iron, could never have taken
place. Weapons technology structures the economy. According to the writer
cited above, "Nothing is more ironic or revealing about our society
than the fact that hugely destructive war is a very progressive force in
it. ... War production is progressive because it is production that would
not otherwise have taken place. (It is not so widely appreciated, for
example, that the civilian standard of living rose during World War
II.)" This is not "ironic or revealing," but essentially a
simple statement of fact.

It should also be noted that the war production
has a dependably stimulating effect outside itself. Far from constituting
a "wasteful" drain on the economy, war spending, considered
pragmatically, has been a consistently positive factor in the rise of
gross national product and of individual productivity. A former Secretary
of the Army has carefully phrased it for public consumption thus: "If
there is, as I suspect there is, a direct relation between the stimulus of
large defense spending and a substantially increased rate of growth of
gross national product, it quite simply follows that defense spending per
se might be countenanced on economic grounds alone [emphasis added] as a
stimulator of the national metabolism." Actually, the fundamental
nonmilitary utility of war in the economy is far more widely acknowledged
than the scarcity of such affirmations as tha quoted above would suggest.

But negatively phrased public recognitions of
the importance of war to the general economy abound. The most familiar
example is the effect of "peace threats" on the stock market,
e.g., "Wall Street was shaken yesterday by news of an apparent peace
feeler from North Vietnam, but swiftly recovered its com- posure after
about an hour of sometimes indiscriminate selling." Savings banks
solicit deposits with similar cautionary slogans, e.g., "If peace
breaks out, will you be ready for it?" A more subtle case in point
was the recent refusal of the Department of Defense to permit the West
German government to substitute nonmilitary goods for unwanted armaments
in its purchase commitments from the United States; the decisive
consideration was that the German purchases should not affect the general
(nonmilitary) economy. Other incidental examples are to be found in the
pressures broght to bear on the Department when it announces plans to
close down an obsolete facility (as a "wasteful" form of
"waste"). and in the usual coordination of stepped-up mililtary
activities (as in Vietnam in 1965) with dangerously rising unemployment
rates.

Although we do not imply that a substitute for
war in the economy cannot be devised, no combination of techniques for
controlling employment, production, and consumption has yet been tested
that can remotely compare to it in effectiveness. It is, and has been, the
essential economic stabilizer of modern societies.

POLITICAL

The political functions of war have been up to
now even more critical to social stability. It is not surprising,
nevertheless, that discussions of economic conversion for peace tend to
fall silent on the matter of political implementation, and that
disarmament scenarios, often sophisticated in their weighing of
international political factors, tend to disregard the political functions
of the war system withing individual societies.

These functions are essentially organizational.
First of all, the existence of a society as a political "nation"
requires as part of its definition an attitude of relationship toward
other "nations." This is what we usually call a foreign policy.
But a nation's foreign policy can have no substance if it lacks the means
of enforcing its attitude toward other nations. It can do this in a
credible manner only if it implies the threat of maximum political
organization for this purpose--which is to say that it is organized to
some degree for war. War, then, as we have defined it to include all
national activities that recognize the possibility of armed conflict, is
itself the defining ele- ment of any nation's existence vis-a-vis any
other nation. Since it is historically axiomatic that the existence of any
form of weaponry insures its use, we have used the work "peace"
as virtually synonymous with disarmament. By the same token,
"war" is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination
of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the
traditional nation-state.

The war system not only has been essential to
the existence of nations as independent political entities, but has been
equally indispensable to their stable internal political structure.
Without it, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its
"legitimacy," or right to rule its society. The possibility of
war provides the sense of external necessity without which nor government
can long remain in power. The historical record reveals one instance after
another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war
threat led to its dissolution, by the forces of private interest, or
reactions to social injustice, or of other disintegrative elements. The
organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal
political stabilizer. It is ironic that this primary function of war has
been generally recognized by historians only where it has been expressly
acknowledged--in the pirate societies of the great conquerors.

The basic authority of a modern state over its
people resides in its war powers. (There is, in fact, good reason to
believe that codified law had its origins in the rules of conduct
established by military victors for dealing with the defeated enemy, which
were later adapted to apply to all subject populations.) On a day-to-day
basis, it is represented by the institution of police, armed organizations
charged expressly with dealing with "internal enemies" in a
military manner. Like the conventional "external" military, the
police are also substantially exempt from many civilian legal restraints
on their social behavior. In some countries, the artificial distinction
between police and other military forces does not exist. On the long-term
basis, a government's emergency war powers -- inherent in the structure of
even the most libertarian of nations -- define the most significant aspect
of the relation between state and citizen.

In advanced modern democratic societies, the
war system has provided political leaders with another political-economic
function of increasing importance: it has served as the last great
safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As economic
productivity increases to a level further and further above that of
minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult for a society to
maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of "hewers of
wood and drawers of water". The further progress of auto- mation can
be expected to differentiate still more sharply between
"superior" workers and what Ricardo called "menials,"
while simultaneously aggravating the problem of maintaining an unskilled
labor supply.

The arbitrary nature of war expenditures and of
other military activities make them ideally suited to control these
essential class relationships. Obviously, if the war system were to be
discarded, new political machinery would be needed at once to serve this
vital subfunction. Until it is developed, the continuance of the war
system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to
preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an
incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal
organization of power.

SOCIOLOGICAL

Under this heading, we will examine a nexus of
functions served by the war system that affect human behavior in society.
In general, they are broader in application and less susceptible to direct
observation than the economic and political factors previously considered.

The most obvious of these functions is the
time-honored use of military institutions to provide antisocial elements
with an acceptable role in the social structure. The disintegrative,
unstable social movements loosely described as "fascist" have
traditionally taken root in societies that have lacked adequate military
or paramilitary outlets to meet the needs of these elements. This function
has been critical in periods of rapid change. The danger signals are easy
to recognize, even though the stigmata bear different names at different
times. The current euphemistic cliches--"juvenile delinquency"
and "alienation" -- have had their counterparts in every age. In
earlier days these conditions were dealt with directly by the military
without the complications of due process, usually through press gangs or
outright enslavement. But it is not hard to visualize, for example, the
degree of social disruption that might have taken place in the United
States during the last two decades if the problem of the socially
disaffected of the post-World War II period had been foreseen and
effectively met. The younger, and more dangerous, of these hostile social
groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System.

This system and its analogues elsewhere furnish
remarkably clear examples of disguised military utility. Informed persons
in this country have never accepted the official rationale for a peacetime
draft--military necessity, preparedness, etc. --as worthy of serious
consideration. But what has gained credence among thoughtful men is the
rarely voiced, less easily refuted, proposition that the institution of
military service has a "patriotic" priority in our society that
must be maintained for its own sake. Ironically, the simplistic official
justification for selective service comes closer to the mark, once the
non-military functions of military institutions are understood. As a
control device over the hostile, nihilistic, and potentially unsettling
elements of a society in transition, the draft can again be defended, and
quite convincingly, as a "military" necessity.

Nor can it be considered a coincidence that
overt military activity, and thus the level of draft calls, tend to follow
the major fluctuations in the unemployment rate in the lower age groups.
This rate, in turn, is a timetested herald of social discontent. It must
be noted also that the armed forces in every civilization have provided
the principal state-supported haven for what we now call the
"unemployable." The typical European standing army (of fifty
years ago) consisted of "...troops unfit for employment in commerce,
industry, or agriculture, led by officers unfit to practice any legitimate
profession or to conduct a business enterprise." This is still
largely true, if less apparent. In a sense, this function of the military
as the custodian of the economically or cuturally deprived was the
forerunner of most contemporary civilian social-welfare programs, from the
W.P.A. to various forms of "socialized" medicine and social
security. It is interesting that liberal sociologists currently proposing
to use the Selective Service System as a medium of cultural upgrading of
the poor consider this a novel application of military practice.

Although it cannot be said absolutely that such
critical measures of social control as the draft require a military
rationale, no modern society has yet been willing to risk experimentation
with any other kind. Even during such periods of comparatively simple
social crisis as the so-called Great Depression of the 1930s, it was
deemed prudent by the government to invest minor make-work projects, like
the "Civilian" Conservation Corps, with a military character,
and to place the more ambitious National Recovery Administration under the
direction of a professional army officer at its inception. Today, at least
one small Northern European country, plagued with uncontrollable unrest
among its "alienated youth," is considering the expansion of its
armed forces, despite the problem of making credible the expansion of a
non-existent external threat.

Sporadic efforts have been made to promote
general recognition of broad national values free of military connotation,
but they have been ineffective. For example, to enlist public support of
even such modest programs of social adjustment as "fighting
inflation" or "maintaining physical fitness" it has been
necessary for the government to utilize a patriotic (i.e. military)
incentive. It sells "defense" bonds and it equates health with
military preparedness. This is not surprising; since the concept of
"nationhood" implies readiness for war, a "national"
program must do likewise.

In general, the war system provides the basic
motivation for primary social organization. In so doing, it reflects on
the societal level the incentives of individual human behavior. The most
important of these, for social purposes, is the individual psychological
rationale for allegiance to a society and its values. Allegiance requires
a cause; a cause requires an enemy. This much is obvious; the critical
point is that the enemy that defines the cause must seem genuinely
formidable. Roughly speaking, the presumed power of the "enemy"
sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must
be proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of
course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and
frightfulness.

It follows, from the patterns of human
behavior, that the credibility of a social "enemy" demands
similarly a readiness of response in proportion to its menace. In a broad
social context, "an eye for an eye" still characterizes the only
acceptable attitude toward a presumed threat of aggression, despite con-
trary religious and moral precepts governing personal conduct. The
remoteness of personal decision from social consequence in a modern
society makes it easy for its members to maintain this attitude without
being aware of it. A recent example is the war in Vietnam; a less recent
one was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In each case, the extent
and gratuitousness of the slaughter were abstracted into political
formulae by most Americans, once the proposition that the victims were
"enemies" was established. The war system makes such an
abstracted response possible in nonmilitary contexts as well. A
conventional example of this mechanism is the inability of most people to
connect, let us say, the starvation of millions in India with their own
past conscious political decision-making. Yet the sequential logic linking
a decision to res- trict grain production in America with an eventual
famine in Asia is obvious, unambiguous, and unconcealed.

What gives the war system its preeminent role
in social organization, as elsewhere, is its unmatched authority over life
and death. It must be emphasized again that the war system is not a mere
social extension of the presumed need for individual human violence, but
itself in turn serves to rationalize most nonmilitary killing. It also
provides the precedent for the collective willingness of members of a
society to pay a blood price for institutions far less central to social
organization that war. To take a handy example..."rather than accept
speed limits of twenty miles an hour we prefer to let automobiles kill
forty thousand people a year." A Rand analyst puts it in more general
terms and less rhetorically: "I am sure that there is, in effect, a
desirable level of automobile accidents---desirable, that is, from a broad
point of view; in the sense that it is a necessary concomitant of things
of greater value to society." The point may seem too obvious for
iteration, but it is essential to an understanding of the important
motivational function of war as a model for collective sacrifice.

A brief look at some defunct premodern
societies is instructive. One of the most noteworthy features common to
the larger, more complex, and more successful of ancient civilizations was
their widespread use of the blood sacrifice. If one were to limit
consideratin to those cultures whose regional hegemony was so complete
that the prospect of "war" had become virtually inconceivable
---as was the case with several of the great pre-Columbian societies of
the Western Hemisphere---it would be found that some form of ritual
killing occupied a position of paramount social importance in each.
Invariably, the ritual was invested with mythic or religious significance;
as will all religious and totemic practice, however, the ritual masked a
broader and more important social function.

In these societies, the blood sacrifice served
the purpose of maintaining a vestigial "earnest" of the
society's capability and willingness to make war-- i.e., kill and be
killed---in the event that some mystical--i.e., unforeseen --circumstance
were to give rise to the possibility. That the "earnest" was not
an adequate substitute for genuine military organization when the
unthinkable enemy, such as the Spanish conquistadores, actually appeared
on the scene in no way negates the function of the ritual. It was
primarily, if not exclusively, a symbolic reminder that war had once been
the central organizing force of the society, and that this condition might
recur.

It does not follow that a transition to total
peace in modern societies would require the use of this model, even in
less "barbaric" guise. But the historical analogy serves as a
reminder that a viable substitute for war as a social system cannot be a
mere symbolic charade. It must involve risk of real personal destruction,
and on a scale consistent with the size and complexity of modern social
systems. Credibility is the key. Whether the substitute is ritual in
nature or functionally substantive, unless it provides a believable life-
and-death threat it will not serve the socially organizing function of
war.

The existence of an accepted external menace,
then, is essential to social cohesiveness as well as to the acceptance of
political authority. The menace must be believable, it must be of a
magnitude consistent with the complexity of the society threatened, and it
must appear, at least, to affect the entire society.

ECOLOGICAL

Men, like all other animals, is subject to the
continuing process of adapting to the limitations of his environment. But
the principal mechanism he has utilized for this purpose is unique among
living creatures. To forestall the inevitable historical cycles of
inadequate food supply, post-Neolithic man destroys surplus members of his
own species by organized warfare.

Ethologists have often observed that the
organized slaughter of members of their own species is virtually unknown
among other animals. Man's special propensity to kill his own kind (shared
to a limited degree with rats) may be attributed to his inability to adapt
anachronistic patterns of survival (like primitive hunting) to his
development of "civilizations" in which these patterns cannot be
effectively sublimated. It may be attributed to other causes that have
been suggested, such as a maladapted "territorial instinct,"
etc. Nevertheless, it exists and its social expression in war constitutes
a biological control of his relationship to his natural environment that
is peculiar to man alone.

War has served to help assure the survival of
the human species. But as an evolutionary device to improve it, war is
almost unbelievably inefficient. With few exceptions, the selective
processes of other living creatures promote both specific survival and
genetic improvement. When a conventionally adaptive animal faces one of
its periodic crises of insufficiency, it is the "inferior"
members of the species that normally disappear. An animal's social
response to such a crisis may take the form of a mass migration, during
which the weak fall by the wayside. Or it may follow the dramatic and more
efficient pattern of lemming societies, in which the weaker members
voluntarily disperse, leaving available food supplies for the stronger. In
either case, the strong survive and the weak fall. In human societies,
those who fight and die in wars for survival are in general its
biologically stronger members. This is natural selection in reverse.

The regressive genetic effort of war has been
often noted and equally often deplored, even when it confuses biological
and cultural factors. The disproportionate loss of the biologically
stronger remains inherent in traditional warfare. It serves to underscore
the fact that survival of the species, rather than its improvement, is the
fundamental purpose of natural selection, if it can be said to have a
purpose, just as it is the basic premise of this study.

But as the polemologist Gaston Bouthoul has
pointed out, other institutions that were developed to serve this
ecological function have proved even less satisfactory. (They include such
established forms as these: infanticide, practiced chiefly in ancient and
primitive societies; sexual mutilation; monasticism; forced emigration;
extensive capital punishment, as in old China and eighteenth-century
England; and other similar, usually localized, practices.)

Man's ability to increase his productivity of
the essentials of physical life suggests that the need for protection
against cyclical famine may be nearly obsolete. It has thus tended to
reduce the apparent importance of the basic ecological function of war,
which is generally disregarded by peace theorists. Two aspects of its
remain especially relevant, however. The first is obvious: current rates
of population growth, compounded by environmental threat to chemical and
other contaminants, may well bring about a new crisis of insufficiency. If
so, it is likely to be one of unprecedented global magnitude, not merely
regional or temporary. Conventional methods of warfare would almost surely
prove inadequate, in this event, to reduce the consuming population to a
level consistent with survival of the species.

The second relevant factor is the efficiency of
modern methods of mass destruction. Even if their use is not required to
meet a world population crisis, they offer, perhaps paradoxically, the
first opportunity in the history of man to halt the regressive genetic
effects of natural selection by war. Nuclear weapons are indiscriminate.
Their application would bring to an end the disproportionate destruction
of the physically stronger members of the species (the
"warriors") in periods of war. Whether this prospect of genetic
gain would offset the unfavorable mutations anticipated from postnuclear
radioactivity we have not yet determined. What gives the question a
bearing on our study is the possibility that the determination may yet
have to be made.

Another secondary ecological trend bearing on
projected population growth is the regressive effect of certain medical
advances. Pestilence, for example, is no longer an important factor in
population control. The problem of increased life expectancy has been
aggravated. These advances also pose a potentially more sinister problem,
in that undesirable genetic traits that were formerly self-liquidating are
now medically maintained. Many diseases that were once fatal at
preprocreational ags are now cured; the effect of this development is to
perpetuate undesirable susceptibilities and mutations. It seems clear that
a new quasi-eugenic function of war is now in process of formation that
will have to be taken into account in any transition plan. For the time
being, the Department of Defense appears to have recognized such factors,
as has been demonstrated by the planning under way by the Rand Corporation
to cope with the breakdown in the ecological balance anticipated after a
thermonuclear war. The Department has also begun to stockpile birds, for
example, against the expected proliferation of radiation-resistant
insects, etc.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC

The declared order of values in modern
societies gives a high place to the so-called "creative"
activities, and an even higher one to those associated with the advance of
scientific knowledge. Widely held social values can be translated into
political equivalents, which in turn may bear on the nature of a
transition to peace. The attitudes of those who hold these values must be
taken into account in the planning of the transition. The dependence,
therefore, of cultural and scientific achievement on the war system would
be an important consideration in a transition plan even is such
achievement had no inherently necessary social function.

Of all the countless dichotomies invented by
scholars to account for the major differences in art styles and cycles,
only one has been consistently unambiguous in its application to a variety
of forms and cultures. However it may be verbalized, the basic distinction
is this: Is the work war-oriented or is it not? Among primitive peoples,
the war dance is the most important art form. Elsewhere, literature,
music, painting, sculpture, and architecture that has won lasting
acceptance has invariably dealt with a theme of war, expressly or
implicitly, and has expressed the centricity of war to society. The war in
question may be national conflict, as in Shakespeare plays, Beethoven's
music, or Goya's paintings, or it may be reflected in the form of
religious, social, or moral struggle, as in the work of Dante, Rembrandt,
and Bach. Art that cannot be classified as war-oriented is usually
described as "sterile," "decadent," and so on.
Application of the "war standard" to works of art may often
leave room for debate in individual cases, but there is no question of its
role as the fundamental determinant of cultural values. Aesthetic and
moral standards have a common anthropological origin, in the exaltation of
bravery, the willingness to kill and risk death in tribal warfare.

It is also instructive to note that the
character of a society's culture has borne a close relationship to its
war-making potential, in the context of its times. It is no accident that
the current "cultural explosion" in the United States is taking
place during an era marked by an unusually rapid advance in weaponry. This
relationship is more generally recognized than the literature on the
subject would suggest. For example, many artists and writers are now
beginning to express concern over the limited creative options they
envisage in the warless world they think, or hope, may be soon upon us.
They are currently preparing for this possibility by unprecedented
experimentation with meaningless forms; their interest in recent years has
been increasingly engaged by the abstract pattern, the gratuitous emotin,
the random happening, and the unrelated sequence.

The relationshp of war to scientific research
and discovery is more explicit. War is the principal motivational force
for the development of science at every level, from the abstractly
conceptual to the narrowly technological. Modern society places a high
value on "pure" science, but it is historically inescapable that
all the significant discoveries that have been made about the natural
world have been inspired by the real or imaginary military necessities of
their epochs. The consequences of the discoveries have indeed gone far
afield, but war has always provided the basic incentive.

Beginning with the development of iron and
steel, and proceeding through the discoveries of the laws of motion and
thermodynamics to the age of the atomic particle, the synthetic polymer,
and the space capsure, no important scientific advance has not been at
least indirectly initiated by an implicit requirement of weaponry. More
prosaic examples include the transistor radio (an outgrowth of military
communications requirements), the assembly line (from Civil War firearms
needs), the steel-frame building (from the steel battleship), the canal
lock, and so on. A typical adaptation can be seen in a device as modest as
the common lawnmower; it developed from the revolving scythe devised by
Leonardo da Vinci to precede a horse-powered vehicle into enemy ranks.

The most direct relationship can be found in
medical technology. For example, a giant "walking machine," and
amplifier of body motions invented for military use in difficult terrain,
is now making it possible for many previously con- fined to wheelchairs to
walk. The Vietnam war alone has led to spectacular improvements in
amputation procedures, blood-handling techniques, and surgical logistics.
It has stimulated new large-scale research on malaria and other typical
parasite diseases; it is hard to estimate how long this t? Amoould
otherwise have been delayed, despite its enormous nonmilitary importance
to nearly half the world's population.

OTHER

We have elected to omit from our discussion of
the nonmilitary functions of war those we do not consider critical to a
transition program. This is not to say they are unimportant, however, but
only that they appear to present no special problems for the organization
of a peace-oriented social system. They include the following:

War as a general social release.
This is a psychosocial function, serving the same purpose for a
society as do the holiday, the celebration, and the orgy for the
individual---the release and redistribution of undifferentiated
tensions. War provides for the periodic necessary readjustment of
standards of social behavior (the "moral climate") and for
the dissipation of general boredom, one of the most consistently
undervalued and unrecognized of social phenomena.

War as a generational stabilizer.
This psychological function, served by other behavior patterns in
other animals, enables the physically deteriorating older generation
to maintain its control of the younger, destroying it if necessary.

War as an idealogical clarifier.
The dualism that characterized the traditional dialectic of all
branches of philosophy and of stable political relationships stems
from war as the prototype of conflict. Except for secondary
considerations, there cannot be, to put it as simply as possible, more
than two sides to a question because there cannot be more than two
sides to a war.

War as the basis for the international
understanding. Before the development of modern communications,
the strategic requirements of war provided the only substantial
incentive for the enrichment of one national culture with the
achievements of another. Altough this is still the case in many
international relationships, the function is obsolescent.

We have also forgone extended characterization
of those functions we assume to be widely and explicitly recognized. An
obvious example is the rold of war as controller of the quality and degree
of unemployment. This is more than an economic and political subfunction;
its sociological, cultural, and ecological aspects are also important,
although often teleonomic. But none affect the general problem of
substitution. The same is true of certain other functions; those we have
included are sufficient to define the scope of the problem.

SECTION 6 - SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF
WAR

By now it should be clear that the most
detailed and comprehensive master plan for a transition to world peace
will remain academic if it fails to deal forthrightly with the problem of
the critical nonmilitary functions of war. The social needs they serve are
essential; if the war system no longer exists to meet them, substitute
institutions will have to be established for the purpose. These surrogates
must be "realistic," which is to say of a scope and nature that
can be conceived and implemented in the context of present-day social
capabilities. This is not the truism it may appear to be; the requirements
of radical social change often reveal the distinction between a most
conservative projection and a wildly utopian scheme to be fine indeed.

In this section we will consider some possible
substitutes for these functions. Only in rare instances have they been put
forth for the purposes which concern us here, but we see no reason to
limit ourselves to proposals that address themselves explicitly to the
problem as we have outlined it. We will disregard the ostensible, or
military, functions of war; it is a premise of this study that the
transition to peace implies absolutely that they will no longer exist in
any relevant sense. We will also disregard the noncritical functions
exemplified at the end of the preceding section.

ECONOMIC

Economic surrogates for war must meet two
principal criteria. They must be "wasteful," in the common sense
of the word, and they must operate outside the normal supply-demand
system. A corollary that should be obvious is that the magnitude of the
waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular society. An
economy as advanced and complex as our own requires the planned average
annual destructoin of not less than 10 percent of gross national product
if it is effectively to fulfill its stabilizing function. When the mass of
a balance wheel is inadequate to the power it is intended to control, its
effect can be self-defeating, as with a runaway locomotive. The analogy,
though crude, is especially apt for the American economy, as our record of
cyclical depressions shows. All have taken place during periods of grossly
inadequate military spending.

Those few economic conversion programs which by
implication acknowledge the nonmilitary economic function of war (at least
to some extent) tend to assume that so-called social-welfare expenditures
will fill the vacuum created by the disappearance of military spending.
When one considers the backlog of un- finished business---proposed but
still unexecuted---in this field, the assumption seems plausible. Let us
examine briefly the following list, which is more or less typical of
general social welfare programs.

HEALTH. Drastic expansion of
medical research, education, and training facilities; hospital and
clinic construction; the general objective of complete
government-guaranteed health care for all, at a level consistent with
current developments in medical technology.

EDUCATION. The equivalent of the
foregoing in teacher training; schools and libraries; the drastic
upgrading of standards, with the general objective of making available
for all an attainable educational goal equivalent to what is now
considered a professional degree.

HOUSING. Clean, comfortable, safe,
and spacious living space for all, at the level now enjoyed by about
15 percent of the population in this country (less in most others).

TRANSPORTATION. The establishment
of a system of mass public transportation making it possible for all
to travel to and from areas of work and recreation quickly,
comfortably, and conveniently, and to travel privately for pleasure
rather than necessity.

PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT. The
development and protection of water supplies, forests, parks, and
other natural resources; the elimination of chemical and bacterial
contaminants from air, water, and soil.

POVERTY. The genuine elimination
of poverty, defined by a standard consistent with current economic
productivity, by means of a guaranteed annual income or whatever
system of distribution will best assure its achievement.

This is only a sampler of the more obvious
domestic social welfare items, and we have listed it in a deliberately
broad, perhaps extravagant, manner. In the past, such a vague and
ambitious-sounding "program" would have been dismissed out of
hand, without serious consideration; it would clearly have been, prima
facie, far too costly, quite apart from its political implications. Our
objective to it, on the other hand, could hardly be more contradictory. As
an economic substitute for war, it is inadequate because it would be far
too cheap.

If this seems paradoxical, it must be
remembered that up to now all proposed social-welfare expenditures have
had to be measured within the war economy, not as a replacement for it.
The old slogan about a battleship or an ICBM costing as much as x
hospitals or y schools or z homes takes on a very different meaning if
there are to be more battleships or ICBM's.

Since the list is general, we have elected to
forestall the tangential controversy that surrounds arbitraty cost
projections by offering no individual cost estimates. But the maximum
program that could be physically effected along the lines indicated could
approach the established level of military spending only for a limited
time--in our opinion, subject to a detailed cost-and-feasibility analysis,
less than ten years. In this short period, at this rate, the major goals
of the program would have been achieved. Its capital-investment phase
would have been completed, and it would have established a permanent
comparatively modest level of annual operating cost--within the framework
of the general economy.

Here is the basic weakness of the sociel-welfare
surrogate. On the short-term basis, a maximum program of this sort could
replace a normal military spending program, provided it was designed, like
the military model, to be subject to arbitrary control. Public housing
starts, for example, or the development of modern medical centers might be
accelerated or halted from time to time, as the requirements of a stable
economy might dictate. But on the long-term basis, social-welfare
spending, no matter how often redefined, would necessarily become an
integral, accepted part of the economy, of no more value as a stabilizer
than the automobile industry or old age and survivors' insurance. Apart
from whatever merit social-welfare programs are deemed to have for their
own sake, their function as a substitute for war in the economy would thus
be self-liquidating. They might serve, however, as expedients pending the
development of more durable substitute measures.

Another economic surrogate that has been
proposed is a series of giant "space research" programs. These
have already demonstrated their utility in more modest scale within the
military economy. What has been implied, although not yet expressly put
forth, is the development of a long-range sequence of space-research
projects with largely unattainable goals. This kind of program offers
several advantages lacking in the social welfare model. First, it is
unlikely to phase itself out, regardless of the predictable
"surprises" science has in store for us: the universe is too
big. In the event some individual project unexpectedly succeeds there
would be no dearth of substitute problems. For example, if colonization of
the moon proceeds on schedule, it could then become "necessary"
to establish a beachhead on Mars or Jupiter, and so on. Second, it need be
no more dependent on the general supply-demand economy than its military
prototype. Third, it lends itself extraordinarily well to arbitrary
control.

Space research can be viewed as the nearest
modern equivalent yet devised to the pyramid-building, and similar
ritualistic enterprises, of ancient societies. It is true that the
scientific value of the space program, even of what has already been
accomplished, is substantial on its own terms. But current programs are
absurdly obviously disproportionate, in the relationship of the knowledge
sought to the expenditures committed. All but a small fraction of the
space budget, measured by the standards of comparable scientific
objectives, must be charged de facto to the military economy. Future space
research, projected as a war surrogate, would further research, projected
as a war surrogate, would further reduce the "scientific"
rationale of its budget to a minuscule percentage indeed. As a purely
economic substitute for war, therefore, extension of the space program
warrants serious consideraton.

In Section 3 we pointed out that certain
disarmament models, which we called conservative, postulated extremely
expensive and elaborate inspection systems. Would it be possible to extend
and institutionalize such systems to the point where they might serve as
economic surrogates for war spending? The organization of failsafe
inspection machinery could well be ritualized in a manner similar to that
of established military processes. "Inspection teams" might be
very like weapons. Inflating the inspection budget to military scale
presents no difficulty. The appeal of this kind of scheme lies in the
comparative ease of transition between two parallel systems.

The "elaborate inspection" surrogate
is fundamentally fallacious, however. Although it might be economically
useful, as well as politically necessary, during the disarmament
transition, it would fail as a substitute for the economic function of war
for one simple reason. Peace-keeping inspection is part of a war system,
not of a peace system. It implies the possibility of weapons maintenance
or manufacture, which could not exist in a world at peace as here defined.
Massive inspection also implies sanctions, and thus war-readiness.

The same fallacy is more obvious in plans to
create a patently useless "defense conversion" apparatus. The
long-discredited proposal to build "total" civil defense
facilities is one example; another is the plan to establish a giant
antimissile missile complex (Nike-X, et al.). These programs, of course,
are economic rather than strategic. Nevertheless, they are not substitutes
for military spending but merely different forms of it.

A more sophisticated variant is the proposal to
establish the "Unarmed Forces" of the United States. This would
conveniently maintain the entire institutional military structure,
redirecting it essentially toward social-welfare activities on a global
scale. It would be, in effect, a giant military Peace Corps. There is
nothing inherently unworkable about this plan, and using the existing
military system to effectuate its own demise is both ingenious and
convenient. But even on a greatly magnified world basis, social-welfare
expenditures must sooner or later reenter the atmosphere of the normal
economy. The practical transitional virtues of such a scheme would thus be
eventually negated by its inadequacy as a permanent economic stabilizer.

POLITICAL

The war system makes the stable government of
societies possible. It does this essentially by providing an external
necessity for a society to accept political rule. In so doing, it
establishes the basis for nationhood and the authority of government to
control its constituents. What other institution or combination of
programs might serve these functions in its place?

We have already pointed out that the end of the
war means the end of national sovereignty, and thus the end of nationhood
as we know it today. But this does not necessarily mean the end of nations
in the administrative sense, and internal political power will remain
essential to a stable society. The emerging "nations" of the
peace epoch must continue to draw political authority from some source.

A number of proposals have been made governing
the relations between nations after total disarmament; all are basically
juridical in nature. They contemplate institutions more or less like a
World Court, or a United Nations, but vested with real authority. They may
or may not serve their ostansible post-military purpose of settling
internatinal disputes, but we need not discuss that here. None would offer
effective external pressure on a peace-world nation to organize itself
politically.

It might be argued that a well-armed
international police force, operating under the authority of such a
supranational "court," could well serve the function of external
enemy. This, however, would constitute a military operation, like the
inspection schemes mentioned, and, like them, would be inconsistent with
the premise of an end to the war system. It is possible that a variant of
the "Unarmed Forces" idea might be developed in such a way that
its "constructive" (i.e., social welfare) activities could be
combined with an economic "threat" of sufficient size and
credibility to warrant political organization. Would this kind of threat
also be contradictory to our basic premise?--that is, would it be
inevitably military? Not necessarily, in our view, but we are skeptical of
its capacity to evoke credibility. Also, the obvious destabilizing effect
of any global social welfare surrogate on politically necessary class
relationships would create an entirely new set of transition problems at
least equal in magnitude.

Credibility, in fact, lies at the heart of the
problem of developing a political substitute for war. This is where the
space-race proposals, in many ways so well suited as economic substitutes
for war, fall short. The most ambitious and unrealistic space project
cannot of itself generate a believable external menace. It has been hotly
argued that such a menace would offer the "last, best hope of
peace," etc., by uniting mankind against the danger of destruction by
"creatures" from other planets or from outer space. Experiments
have been proposed to test the credibility of an out-of-our-world invasion
threat; it is possible that a few of the more difficult-to-explain
"flying saucer" indicents of recent years were in fact early
experiments of this kind. If so, they could hardly have been judged
encouraging. We anticipate no difficulties in making a "need"
for a giant super space program credible for economic purposes, even were
there not ample precedent; extending it, for political purposes, to
include features unfortunately associated with science fiction would
obviously be a more dubious undertaking.

Nevertheless, an effective political substitute
for war would require "alternate enemies," some of which might
seem equally farfetched in the context of the current war system. It may
be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually
replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the
principal apparent threat to the survival of the species. Poisoning of the
air, and of the principal sources of food and water supply, is already
well advanced, and at first glance would seem promising in this respect;
it constitutes a threat that can be dealt with only through social
organization and political power. But from present indications it will be
a generation to a generation and a half before environmental pollution,
however severe, will be sufficiently menacing, on a global scale, to offer
a possible basis for a solution.

It is true that the rate of pollution could be
increased selectively for this purpose; in fact, the mere modifying of
existing programs for the deterrence of pollution could speed up the
process enough to make the threat credible much sooner. But the pollution
problem has been so widely publicized in recent years that it seems highly
improbably that a program of deliberate environ- mental poisoning could be
implemented in a politically acceptable manner.

However unlikely some of the possible alternate
enemies we have mentioned may seem, we must emphasize that one must be
found, of credible quality and magnitude, if a transition to peace is ever
to come about without social disintegration. It is more probably, in our
judgement, that such a threat will have to be invented, rather than
developed from unknown conditions. For this reason, we believe further
speculation about its putative nature ill-advised in this context. Since
there is considerable doubt, in our minds, that any viable political
surrogate can be devised, we are reluctant to compromise, by premature
discussion, any possible option that may eventually lie open to our
government.

SOCIOLOGICAL

Of the many functions of war we have found
convenient to group together in this classification, two are critical. In
a world of peace, the continuing stability of society will require: 1) an
effective substitute for military institutions that can neutralize
destabilizing social elements and 2) a credible motivational surrogate for
war that can insure social cohesiveness. The first is an essential element
of social control; the second is the basic mechanism for adapting
individual human drives to the needs of society.

Most proposals that address themselves,
explicitly or otherwise, to the postwar problem of controlling the
socially alienated turn to some variant of the Peace Corps or the
so-called Job Corps for a solution. The socially disaffected, the
economically unprepared, the psychologically unconformable, the hard-core
"delinquents," the incorrigible "subversives," and the
rest of the unemployable are seen as somehow transformed by the
disciplines of a service modeled on military precedent into more or less
dedicated social service workers. This presumption also informs the
otherwise hardheaded ratiocination of the "Unarmed Forces" plan.

The problem has been addressed, in the language
of popular sociology, by Secretary McNamara. "Even in our abundant
societies, we have reason enough to worry over the tensions that coil and
tighten among underprivileged young people, and finally flail out in
delinquency and crime. What are we to expect.. where mounting frustrations
are likely to fester into eruptions of violence and extremism?" In a
seemingly unrelated passage, he continues: "It seems to me that we
could move toward remedying that inequity [of the Selective Service
System] by asking every young person in the United States to give two
years of service to his country--whether in one of the military services,
in the Peace Corps, or in some other volunteer developmental w? Amat home
or abroad. We could encourage other countries to do the same." Here,
as elsewhere throughout this significant speech, Mr.McNamara has focused,
indirectly but unmistakably, on one of the key issues bearing on a
possible transition to peace, and has later indicated, also indirectly, a
rough approach to its resolution, again phrased in the language of the
current war system.

It seems cleara that Mr.McNamara and other
proponents of the peace-corps surrogate for this tar function lean heavily
on the success of the paramilitary Depression programs mentioned in the
last section. We find the precedent wholly inadequate in degree. Neither
the lack of relevant precedent, however, nor the dubious social welfare
sentimentality characterizing this approach warrant its rejection without
careful study. It may be viable --- provided, first, that the military
origin of the Corps format be effectively rendered out of its operational
activity, and second, that the transition from paramilitary activities to
"developmental w? A" can be effected without regard to the
attitudes of the Corps personnel or to the "value" of the work
it is expected to perform.

Another possible surrogate for the control of
potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form
consistent with modern technology and political processes, of slavery. Up
to now, this has been suggested only in fiction, notably in the works of
Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and others engaged in the imaginative anticipation
of the sociology of the future. But the fantasies projected in Brave New
World and 1984 have seemed less and less implausible over the years since
their publication. The traditional association of slavery with ancient
preindustrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced
forms of social organization, nor should its equally traditional
incompatibility with Western moral and economic values. It is entirely
possible that the development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an
absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace. As a
practical matter, conversion of the code of military discipline to a
euphemized form of enslavement would entail surprisingly little revision;
the logical first stepmoould be the adoption of some form of
"universal" military service.

When it comes to postulating a credible
substitute for war capable of directing human behavior patterns in behalf
of social organization, few options suggest themselves. Like its political
function, the motivational function of war requires the existence of a
genuinely menacing social enemy. The principal difference is that for
purposes of motivating basic allegiance, as distinct from accepting
political authority, the "alternate enemy" must imply a more
immediate, tangible, and directly felt threat of destruction. It must
justify the need for taking and paying a "blood price" in wide
areas of human concern.

In this respect, the possible enemies noted
earlier would be insufficient. One exception might be the
environmental-pollution model, if the danger to society it posed was
genuinely imminent. The fictive models would have to carry the weight of
extraordinary conviction, underscored with a not inconsiderable actual
sacrifice of life; the construction of an up-to-date mythological or
religious structure for this purpose would present difficulties in our
era, but must certainly be considered.

Games theorists have suggested, in other
contexts, the development of "blood games" for the effective
control of individual aggressive impulses. It is an ironic commentary on
the current state of war and peace studies that it was left not to
scientists but to the makers of a commercial film to develop a model for
this notion, on the implausible level of popular melodrama, as a
ritualized manhunt. More realistically, such a ritual might be socialized,
in the manner of the Spanish Inquisition and the less formal witch trials
of other periods, for purposes of "social purification,"
"state security," or other rationale both acceptable and
credible to postwar societies. The feasibility of such an updated version
of still another ancient institution, though doubtful, is considerably
less fanciful than the wishful notion of many peace planners that a
lasting condition of peace can be brought about without the most
painstaking examination of every possible surrogate for the essential
functions of war. What is involved here, in a sense, is the quest for
William Jame's "moral equivalent of war."

It is also possible that the two functions
considered under this heading may be jointly served, in the sense of
establishing the antisocial, for whom a control institution is needed, as
the "alternate enemy" needed to hold society together. The
relentless and irreversible advance of unemployability at all levels of
society, and the similar extension of generalized alienation from accepted
values may make some such program necessary even as an adjunct to the war
system. As before, we will not speculate on the specific forms this kind
of program might take, except to note that there is again ample precedent,
in the treatment meted out to disfavored, allegedly menacing, ethnic
groups in certain societies during certain historical periods.

ECOLOGICAL

Considering the shortcomings of war as a
mechanism of selective population control, it might appear that devising
substitutes for this function should be comparatively simple.
Schematically this is so, but the problem of timing the transition to a
new ecological balancing device makes the feasibility of substitution less
certain.

It must be remembered that the limitation of
war in this function is entirely eugenic. War has not been genetically
progressive. But as a system of gross population control to preserve the
species it cannot fairly be faulted. And, as has been pointed out, the
nature of war is itself in transition. Current trends in warfare--the
increased strategic bombing of civilians and the greater mililtary
importance now attached to the destruction of sources of supply (as
opposed to purely "military" bases and personnel)---strongly
suggest that a truly qualititative improvement is in the making. Assuming
the war system is to continue, it is more than probably that the
regressively selective quality of war will have been reversed, as its
victims become more genetically representative of their societies.

There is no question but that a universal
requirement that procreation be limited to the products of artificial
inseminatin would provide a fully adequate substitute control for
population levels. Such a reproductive system would, of course, have the
added advantage of being susceptible of direct eugenic management. Its
predictable further development---conception and embryonic growth taking
place wholly under laboratory conditions--would extend these controls to
their logical conclusion. The ecological function of war under these
circumstances would not only be superseded but surpassed in effectiveness.

The indicated intermediate step--total control
of conception with a variant of the ubiquitous "pill," via water
supplies or certain essential foodstuffs, offset by a controlled
"antidote"---is already under development. There oould appear to
be no foreseeable need to revert to any of the outmoded practices referred
to in the previous section (infanticide, etc.) as there might have been if
the possibility of transition to peace had arisen two generations ago.

The real question here, therefore, does not
concern the viability of this war substitute, but the political problems
involved in bringing it about. It cannot be established while the war
system is still in effect. The reason for this is simple: excess
population is tar material. As long as any society must comtemplate even a
remote possibility ofwar, it must maintain a maximum supportable
population, even when so doing critically aggravates an economic
liability. This is paradoxical, in view of war's role in reducing excess
population, but it is readily understood. War controls the general
population level, but the ecological interest of any single society lies
in maintaining its hegemony vis-a-vis other societies. The obvious analogy
can be seen in any free-enterprise economy. Practices damaging to the
society as a whole--both competitive and monopolistic--are abetted by the
conflicting economic motives of individual capital interests. The obvious
precedent can be found in the seemingly irrational political difficulties
which have blacked universal adoption of simple birth-control methods.
Nations desperately in need of increasing unfavorable
production-consumption ratios are nevertheless unwilling to gamble their
possible military requirements of twenty years hence for this purpose.
Unilateral population control, as practiced in ancient Japan and in other
isolated societies, is out of the question in today's world.

Since the eugenic solution cannot be achieved
until the transition to the peace system takes place, why not wait? One
must qualify the inclination to agree. As we noted earlier, a real
possibility of an unprecedented global crisis of insufficiency exists
today, which the war system may not be able to forestall. If this should
come to pass before an agreed-upon transition to peace were completed, the
result might be irrevocably disastrous. There is clearly no solution to
this dilemma; it is a risk which must be taken. But it tends to support
the view that if a decision is made to elminate the war system, it were
better done sooner than later.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC

Strictly speaking, the function of war as the
determinant of cultural values and as the prime mover of scientific
progress may not be critical in a world without war. Our criterion for the
basic nonmilitary functions of war has been: Are they necessary to the
survival and stability of society? The absolute need for substitute
cultural value-determinants and for the continued advance of scientific
knowledge is not established. We believe it important, however, in behalf
of those for whom these functions hold subjective significance, that it be
known what they can reasonably expect in culture and science after a
transition to peace.

So far as the creative arts are concerned,
there is no reason to believe they would disappear, but only that they
would change in charactermand relative social importance. The elimination
of war would in due course deprive them of their principal conative force,
but it would necessarily take some time for the transition, and perhaps
for a generation thereafter, themes of sociomoral conflict inspired by the
war system would be increasingly transferred to the idiom of purely
personal sensibility. At the same time, a new aesthetic oould have to
develop. Whatever its name, form, or rationale, its function would be to
express, in language appropriate to the new period, the once discredited
philosophy that art exists for its own sake. This aesthetic oould reject
unequivocally the classic requirement of paramilitary conflict as the
substantive content of great art. The eventual effect of the peace-world
philosophy of art would be deomcratizing in the extreme, in the sense that
a generally acknowledged subjectivity of artistic standards would equalize
their new, content-free "values."

What may be expected to happen is that art
would be reassigned the role it once played in a few primitive
peace-oriented social systems. This was the functin of pure decoration,
entertainment, or play, entirely free of the burden of expressing the
sociomoral values and conflicts of a war-oriented society. It is
interesting that the groundwork for such a value-free aesthetic is already
being laid today, in growing experimentation in art without content,
perhaps in anticipation of a world without conflict. A cult has developed
around a new kind of cultural determinism, which proposes that the
technological form of a cultural expression determines its values rather
than does its ostensibly meaningful content. Its clear implication is that
there is no "good" or "bad" art, only that which is
appropriate to its (technological) times and that which is not. Its
cultural effect has been to promote circumstantial constructions and
unplanned expressions; it denies to art the relevance of sequential logic.
Its significance in this context is that it provides a working model of
one kind of value-free culture we might reasonably anticipate in a world
at peace.

So far as science is concerned, it might appear
at first glance that a giant space-research program, the most promising
among the proposed economic surrogates for war, might also serve as the
basic stimulator of scientific research. The lack of fundamental organized
social conflict inherent in space work, however, would rule it out as an
adeguate motivational substitute for war when applied to "pure"
science. But it could no doubt sustain the broad range of technological
activity that a space budget of military dimensions oould require. A
similarly scaled social-welfare program could provide a comparable inpetus
to low-keyed technological advances, especially in medicine, rationalized
construction methods, educational psychology, etc. The eugenic substitute
for the ecological function of war oould also require continuing research
in certain areas of the life sciences.

Apart from these partial substitutes for war,
it must be kept in mind that the momentum given to scientific progress by
the great wars of the past century, and even more by the anticipation of
World War III, is intellectually and materially enormous. It is our
finding that if the war system were to end tomorrow this momentum is so
great that the pursuit of scientific knowledge could reasonably be
expected to go forward without noticeable diminution for perhaps two
decades. It would then continue, at a progressively decreasing tempo, for
at least another two decades before the "bank account" of
today's unresolved problems would become exhausted. By the standards of
the questions we have learned to ask today, there would no longer be
anything worth knowing still unknown; we cannot conceive, by definition,
of the scientific questions to ask once those we can now comprehend are
answered.

This leads unavoidably to another matter: the
intrinsic value of the unlimited search for knowledge. We of course offer
no independent value judgments here, but it is germane to point out that a
substantial minority of scientific opinion feels that search to be
circumscribed in any case. This opinion is itself a factor in considering
the need for a substitute for the scientific function of war. For the
record, we must also take note of the precedent that during long periods
of human history, often covering thousands of years, in which no intrinsic
social value was assigned to scientific progress, stable societies did
survive and flourish. Although this could not have been possible in the
modern industrial world, we cannot be certain it may not again be true in
a future world at peace.

SECTION 7 - SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

THE NATURE OF WAR

War is not, as is widely assumed, primarily an
instrument of polcy utilized by nations to extend or defend their
expressed political values or their economic interests. On the contrary,
it is itself the principal basis of organizatin on which all modern
societies are constructed. The common proximate cause of war is the
apparent interference of one nation with the aspirations of another. But
at the root of all ostensible differences of national interest lie the
dynamic requirements of the war system itself for periodic armed conflict.
Readiness for war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly
than their economic and political structures, which it subsumes.

Economic analyses of the anticipated problems
of transition to peace have not recognized the broad preminence of war in
the definition of social systems. The same is true, with rare and only
partial exceptions, of model disarmament "scenarios." For this
reason, the value of this previous work is limited to the mechanical
aspects of transition. Certain features of these models may perhaps be
applicable to a real situation of conversion to peace; this till depend on
their compatibility with a substantive, rather than a procedural, peace
plan. Such a plan can be developed only from the premise of full
understanding of the nature of the war system it proposes to abolish,
which in turn presupposes detailed comprehension of the functions the war
system performs for society. It will require the construction of a
detailed and feasible system of substitutes for those functions that are
necessary to the stability and survival of human societies.

THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR

The visible, military function of war requires
no elucidation; it is not only obvious but also irrelevant to a transition
to the condition of peace, in which it will by definition be superfluous.
It is also subsidiary in social significance to the implied, nonmilitary
functions of war; those critical to transition can be summarized in five
principal groupings.

ECONOMIC. War has provided both
ancient and modern societies with a dependable system for stabilizing
and controlling national economies. No alternate method of control has
yet been tested in a complex modern economy that has shown itself
remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness.

POLITICAL. The permanent
possibility of war is the foundation for stable government; it
supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority. It
has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions, and it
has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state, by virtue
of the residual war powers inherent in the concept of nationhood. No
modern political ruling group has successfully controlled its
constituency after failing to sustain the continuing credibility of an
external threat of war.

SOCIOLOGICAL. War, through the
medium of military institutions, has uniquely served societies,
throughout the course of known history, as an indispensible controller
of dangerous social dissidence and destructive antisocial tendencies.
As the most formidable of threats to life itself, and as the only one
susceptible to mitigation by social organization alone, it has played
another equally fundamental role: the war system has provided the
machinery through which the motivational forces governing human
behavior have been translated into binding social allegiance. It has
thus ensured the degree of social cohesion necessary to the viability
of nations. No other institution, or groups of institutions, in modern
societies, has successfully served these functions.

ECOLOGICAL. War has been the
principal evolutionary device for maintaining a satisfactory
ecological balance between gross human population and supplies
available for its survival. It is unique to the human species.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC.
War-orientation has determined the basic standards of value in the
creative arts, and has provided the fundamental motivational source of
scientific and technological progress. The concepts that the arts
express values independent of their own forms and that the successful
pursuit of knowledge has intrinsic social value have long been
accepted in modern societies; the development of the arts and sciences
during this period has been corollary to the parallel development of
weaponry.

SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR: CRITERIA

The foregoing functions of war are essential to
the survival of the social systems we know today. With two possible
exceptions they are also essential to any kind of stable social
organization that might survive in a warless world. Discussion of the ways
and means of transition to such a world are meaningless unless
a)substitute institutions can be devised to fill these functions, or b) it
can reasonably be hypothecated that the loss or partial loss of any one
function need not destroy the viability of future societies.

Such substitute institutions and hypotheses
must meet varying criteria. In general, they must be technically feasible,
politically acceptable, and potentially credible to the members of the
societies that adopt them. Specifically, they must be characterized as
follows:

ECONOMIC. An acceptable economic
surrogate for the war system will require the expenditure of resources
for completely nonproductive purposes at a level comparable to that of
the military expenditures otherwise demanded by the size and
complexity of each society. Such a substitute system of apparent
"waste" must be of a nature that will permit it to remain
independent of the normal supply-demand economy; it must be subject to
arbitrary political control.

POLITICAL. A viable political
substitute fir war must posit a generalized external menace to each
society of a nature and degree sufficient to require the organization
and acceptance of political authority.

SOCIOLOGICAL. First, in the
permanent absence of war, new institutions must be developed that will
effectively control the socially destructive seg- ments of societies.
Second, for purposes of adapting the physical and psychological
dynamics of human behavior to the needs of social organization, a
credible substitute for war must generate an omnipresent and readily
understood fear of personal destruction. This fear must be of a nature
and degree sufficient to ensure adherence to societal values to the
full extent that they are acknowledged to transcend the value of
individual human life.

ECOLOGICAL. A substitute for war
in its function as the uniquely human system of population control
must ensure the survival, if not necessarily the improvement, of the
species, in terms of its relations to environmental supply.

CULTURAL AND SCIENTIFIC. A
surrogate for the function of war as the determinant of cultural
values must establish a basis of sociomoral conflict of equally
compelling force and scope. A substitute motivational basis for the
quest for scientific knowledge must be similarly informed by a
comparable sense of internal necessity.

SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR: MODELS

The following substitute institutions, among
others, have been proposed for consideration as replacements for the
nonmilitary functions of war. That they may not have been originally set
forth for that purpose does not preclude or invalidate their possible
application here.

ECONOMIC. a) A comprehensive
social-welfare program, directed toward maximum improvement of general
conditions of human life. b) A giant open-end space research program,
aimed at unreachable targets. c) A permanent, ritualized,
ultra-elaborate disarmament inspection system, and variants of such a
system.

CULTURAL. No replacement
institution offered. SCIENTIFIC. The secondary requirements
of the space research, social welfare, and / or eugenics programs.

SUBSTITUTES FOR THE FUNCTIONS OF WAR:
EVALUATION

The models listed above reflect only the
beginning of the quest for substitute institutions for the functions of
war, rather than a recapitulation of alternatives. It would be both
premature and inappropriate, therefore, to offer final judgments on their
applicability to a transition to peace and after. Furthermore, since the
necessary but complex project of correlating the compatibility of proposed
surrogates for different functions could be treated only in exemplary
fashion at this time, we have elected to withhold such hypothetical
correlations as were tested as statistically inadequate.

Nevertheless, some tentative and cursory
comments on these proposed function-al "solutions" will indicate
the scope of the difficulties involved in this area of peace planning.

ECONOMIC. The social-welfare model
cannot be expected to remain outside the normal economy after the
conclusion of its predominantly capital-investment phase; its value in
this function can therefore be only temporary. The space-research
substitute appears to meet both major criteria, and should be examined
in greater detail, especially in respect to its probable effects on
other war functions. "Elaborate inspection" schemes,
although superficially attractive, are inconsistent with the basic
premise of a transition to peace. The "unarmed forces"
variant, logistically similar, is subject to the same functional
criticism as the general social-welfare model.

POLITICAL. Like the
inspection-scheme surrogates, proposals for plenipoteniary
international police are inherently incompatible with the ending of
the war system. The "unarmed forces" variant, amended to
include unlimited powers of economic sanction, might conceivably be
expanded to constitute a credible external menace. Development of an
acceptable threat from "outer space," presumably in
conjunction with a space-research surrogate for economic control,
appears unpromising in terms of credibility. The
environmental-pollution model does not seem sufficiently responsive to
immediate social control, except through arbitrary acceleration of
current polution trends; this in turn raises questions of political
acceptability. New, less regressive, approaches to the creation of
fictitious global "enemies" invite further investigation.

SOCIOLOGICAL: CONTROL FUNCTION.
Although the various substitutes proposed for this function that are
modeled roughly on the Peace Corps appear grossly inadequate in
potential scope, they should not be ruled out without further study.
Slavery, in a technologically modern and conceptually euphemized form,
may prove a more efficient and flexible institution in this area. MOTIVATIONAL
FUNCTION. ALthough none of the proposed substitutes for war as
the guarantor of social allegiance can be dismissed out of hand, each
presents serious and special difficulties. Intensified environmental
threats may raise ecological dangers; mythmaking dissociated from tar
may no longer be politically feasible; purposeful blood games and
rituals can far more readily be devised than implemented. An
institution combining this function with the preceding one, based on,
but not necessarily imitative of, the precedent of organized ethnic
repression, tarrants careful consideration.

ECOLOGICAL. The only apparent
problem in the application of an adequate eugenic substitute for war
is that of timing; it cannot be effectuated until the transition to
peace has been completed, which involved a serious temporary risk of
ecological failure.

CULTURAL. No plausible substitute
for this function of war has yet been proposed. It may be, however,
that a basic cultural value-determinant is not necessary to the
survival of a stable society. SCIENTIFIC. The same might be
said for the function of war as the prime mover of the search for
knowledge. However, adoption of either a giant space-research program,
a comprehensive social-welfare program, or a master program of eugenic
control would provide motivation for limited technologies.

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

It is apparent, from the foregoing, that no
program or combination of programs yet proposed for a transition to peace
has remotely approached meeting the comprehensive functional requirements
of a world without war. Although one projected system for filling the
economic function of war seems promising, similar optimism cannot be
expressed in the equally essential political and sociological areas. The
other major nonmilitary functions of war---ecological, cultural,
scientific---raise very different problems, but it is least possible that
detailed programming of substitutes in these areas is not prerequisite to
transition. More important, it is not enough to develop adequate but
separate surrogates for the major war functions; they must be fully
compatible and in no degree self-canceling.

Until such a unified program is developed, at
least hypothetically, it is impossible for this or any other group to
furnish meaningful answers to the questions originally presented to us.
When asked how best to prepare for the advent of peace, we must first
reply, as strongly as we can, that the war system cannot responsibly be
allowed to disappear until 1) we know exactly what it is we plan to put in
its place, and 2) we are certain, beyond reasonable doubt, that these
substitute institutions will serve their purposes in terms of the survival
and stability of society. It will then be time enough to develop methods
for effectuating the transition; procedural programming must follow, not
precede, substantive solutions.

Such solitions, if indeed they exist, will not
be arrived at without a revolutionary revision of the modes of thought
heretofore considered appropriate to peace research. That we have examined
the fundamental questions involved from a dispassionate, value-free point
of view should not imply that we do not appreciate the intellectual and
emotional difficulties that must be overcome on all decision-making levels
before these questions are generally acknowledged by others for what they
are. They reflect, on an intellectual level, traditional emotional
resistance to new (more lethal and thus more "shocking") forms
of weaponry. The understated comment of then-Senator Hubert Humphrey on
the pub- lication of ON THERMONUCLEAR WAR is still very mcuh to
the point: "New Thoughts, particularly those which appear to
contradict current assumptions, are always painful for the mind to
contemplate."

Nor, simple because we have not discussed them,
do we minimize the massive reconciliation of conflicting interests with
domestic as well as international agreement on proceeding toward genuine
peace presupposes. This factor was excluded from the purview of our
assignment, but we would be remiss if we failed to take it into account.
Although no insuperable obstacle lies in the path of reaching such general
agreements, formidable short-term private-group and general-class interest
in maintaining the war system is well established and widely recognized.
The resistance to peace stemming from such interest is only tangential, in
the long run, to the basic functions of war, but it will not be easily
overcome, in this country or elsewhere. Some observers, in fact, believe
that it cannot be overcome at all in our time, that the price of peace is,
simply, too high. This bears on our overall conclusions to the extent that
timing in the transference to substitute institutions may often be the
critical factor in their political feasibility.

It is uncertain, at this time, whether peace
will ever be possible. It is far more questionable, by the objective
standard of continued social survival rather than that of emotional
pacifism, that it would be desirable even if it were demonstrably
attainable. The war system, for all its subjective repugnance to important
sections of "public opinion" has demonstrated its effectiveness
since the beginning of recorded history; it has provided the basis for the
development of many impressively durable civilizations, including that
which is dominant today. It has consistently provided unambiguous social
priorities. It is, on the whole, a known quantity. A viable system of
peace, assuming that the great and complex questions of substitute
institutions raised in this Report are both soluble and solved, would
still constitute a venture into the unknown, with the inevitable risks
attendant on the unforeseen, however small and however well hedged.

Government decision-makers tend to choose peace
over war whenever a real option exists, because it usually appears to be
the "safer" choice. Under most immediate circumstances they are
likely to be right. But in terms of long-range social stability, the
opposite is true. At our present state of knowledge and reasonable
inference, it is the war system that must be identified with stability,
the peace system that must be identified with social speculation, however
justifiable the speculation may appear, in terms of subjective moral or
emotional values. A nuclear physicist once remarked, in respect to a
possible disarmament agreement: "If we could change the world into a
world in which no weapons could be made, that would be stabilizing. But
agreements we can expect with the Soviets would be destabilizing."
The qualification and the bias are equally irrelevant; any condition of
genuine total peace, however achieved, would be destabilizing until proved
otherwise.

If it were necessary at this moment to opt
irrevocably for the retention or for the dissolution of the war system,
common prudence would dictate the former course. But it is not yet
necessary, late as the hour appears. And more factors must eventually
enter the war-peace equation than even the most determined search for
alternative institutions for the functions of war can be expected to
reveal. One group of such factors has been given only passing mention in
this Report; it centers around the possible obsolescence of the war system
itself. We have noted, for instance, the limitations of the war system in
filling its ecological function and the declining importance of this
aspect of war. It by no means stretches the imagination to visualize
comparable developments which may compromise the efficacy of war as, for
example, an economic controller or as an organizer of social allegiance.
This kind of possibility, however remote, serves as a reminder that all
calculations of contingency not only involve the weighing of one group of
risks against another, but require a respectful allowance for error on
both sides of the scale.

More expedient reason for pursuing the
investigation of alternate ways and means to serve the current functions
of war is narrowly political. It is possible that one or more major
sovereign nations may arrive, through ambiguous leadership, at a position
in which a ruling administrative class may lose control of basic public
opinion or of its ability to rationalize a desired war. It is not hard to
imagine, in such circumstances, a situation in which such governments may
feel forced to initiate serious full-scale disarmament proceed- ings
(perhaps provoked by "accidental" nuclear explosions), and that
such nego- tiations may lead to the actual disestablishment of military
institutions. As our Report has made clear, this could be catastrophic. It
seems evident that, in the event an important part of the world is
suddenly plunged without suffi- cient warning into an inadvertent peace,
even partial and inadequate prepara- tion for the possibility may be
better than none. The difference could even be critical. The models
considered in the preceding chapter, both those that seem promising and
those that do not, have one positive feature in common--an inher- ent
flexibility of phasing. And despite our strictures against knowingly pro-
ceeding into peace-transition procedures without thorough substantive
prepara- tion, our government must nevertheless be ready to move in this
direction with whatever limited resources of planning are on hand at the
time---if circum- stances so require>. An arbitrary all-or-nothing
approach is no more realistic in the development of contingency peace
programming than it is anywhere else.

But the principal cause for concern over the
continuing effectiveness of the war system, and the more important reason
for hedging with peace planning, lies in the backwardness of current
war-system programming. Its controls have not kept pace with the
technological advances it has made possible. Despite its unarguable
success to date, even in this era of unprecedented potential in mass
destruction, it continues to operate largely on a laissez-faire basis. To
the best of our knowledge, no serious quantified studies have even been
conducted to determine, for example:

---optimum levels of armament production,
for purposes of economic control, at any given relationship between
civilian production and consumption patterns:

---correlation factors between draft
recruitment policies and mensurable social dissidence;

---minimum levels of population destruction
necessary to maintain war-threat credibility under varying political
conditions;

These and other war-function factors are fully
susceptible to analysis by today's computer-based systems, but they have
not been so treated; modern ana- lytical techniques have up to now been
relegated to such aspects of the osten- sible functions of war as
procurement, personnel deployment, weapons analysis, and the like. We do
not disparage these types of application, but only deplore their lack of
utilization to greater capacity in attacking problems of broader scope.
Our concern for efficiency in this context is not aesthetic, economic, or
humanistic. It stems from the axiom that no system can long survive at
either input or output levels that consistently or substantially deviate
from an optimum range. As their data grow increasingly sophisticated, the
war system and its functions are increasingly endangered by such
deviations.

Our final conclusion, therefore, is that it
will be necessary for our govern- ment to plan in depth for two general
contingencies. The first, and lesser, is the possibility of a viable
general peace; the second is the successful contin- uation of the war
system. In our view, careful preparation for the possibility of peace
should be extended, not because we take the position that the end of war
would necessarily be desirable, if it is in fact possible, but because it
may be thrust upon us in some form whether we are ready for it or not.
Planning for rationalizing and quantifying the war system, on the other
hand, to ensure the effectiveness of its major stabilizing functions, is
not only more promis- ing in respect to anticipated results, but is
essential; we can no longer take for granted that it will continue to
serve our purposes well merely because it always has. The objective of
government policy in regard to war and peace, in this perios of
uncertainty, must be to preserve maximum options. The recomenda- tions
which follow are directed to this end.

SECTION 8

RECOMMENDATIONS

We propose the establishment, under
executive order of the President, of a permanent WAR/PEACE Research
Agency, empowered and mandated to execute the programs described in
(2) and (3) below. This agency (a) will be provided with
nonaccountable funds sufficient to implement its responsibilities and
decisions at its own discretion, and (b) will have authority to
preempt and utilize, without restriction, any and all facilities of
the executive branch of the government in pursuit of its objectives.
It will be organized along the lines of the National Security Council,
except that none of its governing, executive, or operating personnel
will hold other public office or governmental responsibility. Its
directorate will be drawn from the broadest practicable spectrum of
scientific disciplines, humanistic studies, applied creative arts,
operating technologies, and otherwise unclassified professional
occupations. It will be responsible solely to the President, or to
other officers of government temporarily deputized by him. Its
operations will be governed entirely by its own rules of procedure.
Its authority will expressly include the unlimited right to withhold
information on its activities and its decisions, from anyone except
the President, whenever it deems such secrecy to be in the public
interest.

The first of the War/Peace Research
Agency's two principal responsibilities will be to determine all that
can be known, including what can reasonably be inferred in terms of
relevant statistical probabilities, that may bear on an eventual
transition to a general condition of peace. The findings in this
Report may be considered to constitute the beginning of this study and
to indicate its orientation; detailed records of the investigations
and findings of the Special Study Group on which this Report is based,
will be furnished the agency, along with whatever clarifying data the
agency deems necessary. This aspect of the agency's work will
hereinafter be referred to as "Peace Research."

The Agency's Peace Research activities
will necessarily include, but not be limited to, the following:

(a) The creative development of
possible substitute institutions for the principal nonmilitary
functions of war.

(b) The careful matching of such
institutions against the criteria summarized in this Report, as
refined, revised, and extended by the agency.

(c) The testing and evaluation of
substitute institutions, for acceptability, feasibility, and
credibility, against hypothecated transitional and postwar
conditions; the testing and evaluation of the effects of the
anticipated atrophy of certain unsubstantiated functions.

(d) The development and testing of the
corelativity of multiple substitute institutions, with the
eventual objective of establishing a comprehensive program of
compatible war substitutes suitable for a planned transition to
peace, if and when this is found to be possible and subsequently
judged desirable by appropriate political authorities.

(e) The preparatin of a wide-ranging
schedule of partial, uncorrelated, crash programs of adjustment
suitable for reducing the dangers of unplanned transition to peace
effected by force majeure.

Peace Research methods will include but
not be limited to, the following:

(b) The full utilization of modern
methods of mathematical modeling, analo- gical analysis, and
other, more sophisticated, quantitative techniques in process of
development that are compatible with computer programming.

(c) The heuristic "peace
games" procedures developed during the course of its
assignment by the Special Study Group, and further extensions of
this basic approach to the testing of institutional functions.

The WAR/PEACE Research Agency's other
principal responsibility will be "War Research." Its
fundamental objective will be to ensure the continuing viability of
the war system to fulfill its essential nonmilitary functions for as
long as the war system is judged necessary to or desirable for the
survival of society. To achieve this end, the War Research groups
within the agency will engage in the following activities:

(a) Quantification of existing
application of the non-military functions of war. Specific
determinations will include, but not be limited to:

the gross amount and the net
proportion of nonproductive military expenditures since World
War II assignable to the need for war as an economic
stabilizer;

the amount and proportion of
military expenditures and destructin of life, property, and
natural resources during this period assignable to the need
for war as an instrument for political control;

similar figures, to the extent that
they can be separately arrived at, assignable to the need for
war to maintain social cohesiveness;

levels of recruitment and
expenditures on the draft and other forms of personnel
deployment attributable to the need for military institutions
to control social disaffectin;

the statistical relationship of war
casualties to world food supplies;

the correlation of military actions
and expenditures with cultural activities and scientific
advances (including necessarily the development of mensurable
standards in these areas).

(b) Establishment of a priori modern
criteria for the execution of the non- military functions of war.
These will include, but not be limited to:

calculation of minimum and optimum
ranges of military expenditure required, under varying
hypothetical conditions, to fulfill these several functions,
separately and collectively;

determination of minimum and
optimum levels of destruction of LIFE, PROPERTY,
and NATURAL RESOURCES prerequisite to the credibility
of external threat essential to the political and motivational
functions;

development of a negotiable formula
governing the relationship between military recruitment and
training policies and the exigencies of social control.

(c) Reconciliation of these criteria
with prevailing economic, political, sociological, and ecological
limitations. The ultimate object of this phase of War Research is
to rationalize the heretofore informal operations of the war
system. It shoud provide practical working procedures through
which responsible governmental authority may resolve the following
war-function problems, among others, under any given
circumstances:

how to determine the optimum
quantity, nature, and timing of military expenditures to
ensure a desired degree of economic control;

how to organize the recruitment,
deployment, and ostensible use of military personnel to ensure
a desired degree of acceptance of authorized social values;

how to compute on a short-term
basis, the nature and extent of the LOSS OF LIFE and
other resources which SHOULD BE SUFFERED and/or INFLICTED
DURING any single outbreako of hostilities to achieve a
desired degree of internal political authority and social
allegiance;

how to project, over extended
periods, the nature and quality of overt warfare which must be
planned and budgeted to achieve a desired degree of contextual
stability for the same purpose; factors to be determined must
include frequency of occurence, length of phase, INTENSITY
OF PHYSICAL DESTRUCTION, extensiveness of geographical
involvement, and OPTIMUM MEAN LOSS OF LIFE;

how to extrapolate accurately from
the foregoing, for ecological purposes, the continuing effect
of the war system, over such extended cycles, on population
pressures, and to adjust the planning of casualty rates
accordingly.

War Research procedures will
necessarily include, but not be limited to, the following:

(a) The collation of economic,
military, and other relevant date into uniform terms, permitting
the reversible translation of heretofore discrete categories of
information.

(b) The development and application of
appropriate forms of cost-effectiveness analysis suitable for
adapting such new constructs to computer terminology, programming,
and projection.

(c) Extension of the "war
games" methods of systems testing to apply, as a
quasi-adversary proceeding, to the nonmilitary functions of war.

Since Both Programs of the WAR/PEACE
RESEARCH Agency will share the same purpose---to maintain governmental
freedom of choice in respect to war and peace until the direction of
social survival is no longer in doubt -- it is of the essence of this
proposal that the agency be constituted without limitation of time.
Its examination of existing and proposed institutions will be
self-liquidating when its own function shall have been superseded by
the historical developments it will have, at least in part, initiated.

NOTES.........

SECTION 1

1. The Economic and Social Consequences of
Disarmament: U.S.Reply to the Inquiry of the Secretary-General of the
United Nations (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, June 1964), pp. 8-9.

1. Vide William D. Grampp, "False Fears of
Disarmament," Harvard Business Review (Jan.-Feb.1964) for a concise
example of this reasoning.

2. Seymour Melman, "The Cost of Inspection
for Disarmament," in Benoit and Boulding, op. cit.

SECTION 5

1. Arthur I. Waskow, Toward the Unarmed Forces
of the United States (Wash- ington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1966),
p.9. (This is the unabridged edition of the text of a report and proposal
prepared for a seminar of strate- gists and Congressman in 1965; it was
later given limited distribution among other persons engaged in related
projects.)

9. The obverse of this phenomenon is
responsible for the principal combat problem of present-day infantry
officers: the unwillingness of otherwise "trained" troops to
fire at an enemy close enough to be recognizable as an individual rather
than simply as a target.

13. Beginning with Herbert Spencer and his
contemporaries, but largely ignor- ed for nearly a century.

14. As in recent draft-law controversy, in
which the issue of selective deferment of the culturally privileged is
often carelessly equated with the preservation of the biologically
"fittest."

15. G.Bouthol, in La Guerre (Paris: Presses
universitairies de France, 1953) and many other more detailed studies. The
useful concept of "polemology," for the study of war as an
independent discipline, is his, as is the notion of "demographic
relaxation," the sudden temporary decline in the rate of popula- tion
increase after major wars.

16. This seemingly premature statement is
supported by one of our own test studies. But it hypothecates both the
stabilizing of world population growth and the institution of fully
adequate environmental controls. Under these two conditions, the
probability of the permanent elimination of involuntary global famine is
68 percent by 1976 and 95 percent by 1981.

SECTION 6

1. This round figure is the median taken from
our comuptations, which cover varying contingencies, but it is sufficient
for the purpose of general dis- cussion.

2. But less misleading than the more elegant
traditional metaphor, in which war expenditures are referred to as the
"ballast" of the economy but which suggests incorrect
quantitative relationships.

3. Typical in generality, scope, and rhetoric.
We have not used any pub- lished program as a model; similarities are
unavoidably coincidental rather than tendentious.

4. Vide the reception of a "Freedom Budget
for all Americans," proposed by A. Philip Randolph et al; it is a
ten-year plan, estimated by its sponsors to cost $185 billion.

5. Waskow, op.cit.

6. By several current theorists, most
extensively and effectively by Robert R. Harris in "The Real
Enemy," an unpublished doctoral dissertation made avail- able to this
study.

7. In ASNE, Montreal address cited.

8. The Tenth Victim.

9. For an examination of some of its social
implications, see Seymour Ruben- feld, Family of Outcasts: A New Theory of
Delinquency (New York: Free Press, 1965).

10. As in Nazi Germany; this type of
"ideological" ethnic repression, direc- ted to specific
sociological ends, should not be confused with traditional economic
exploitation, as of Negroes in the U.S., South Africe, etc.

11. By teams of experimental biologists in
Massachusetts, Michigan, and California, as well as in Mexico and the
U.S.S.R. Preliminary test applications are scheduled in Southeast Asia, in
countries not yet announced.

12. Expressed in the writings of H. Marshall
McLuban, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964) and elsewhere.

13. This rather optimistic estimate was derived
by plotting a three-dimen- sional distribution of three arbitratily
defined variables; the macro-structur- al, relating to the extension of
knowledge beyond the capacity of conscious experience; the organic,
dealing with the manifestations of terrestrial life as inherently
comprehensibel; and the infra-particular, covering the subconcep- tual
requirements of natural phenomena. Values were assigned to the known and
unknown in each parameter, tested against data from earlier chronologies,
and modified heuristically until predictable correlations reached a useful
level of accuracy. "Two decades" means, in this case, 20.6
years, with a standard deviation of only 1.8 years. (An incidental
finding, not pursued to the same degree of accuracy, suggests a greatly
accelerated resolution of issues in the biological sciences after 1972.)

SECTION 7

1. Since they represent an examination of too
small a percentage of the eventual options, in terms of "multiple
mating," the subsystem we developed for this application. But an
example will indicate how one of the most frequen- tly recurring
correlation problems--chronological phasing--was brought to light in this
way. One of the first combinations tested showed remarkably high
coefficients of compatibility, on a post hoc static basis, but no
variations of timing, using a thirty-year transition module, permitted
even marginal synchronization. The combination was thus disqualified. This
would not rule out the possible adequacy of combinations using
modifications of the same fac- tors, however, since minor variations in a
proposed final condition may have disproportionate effects on phasing.

2. Edward Teller, quoted in War/Peace Report
(December 1964).

3. E.g., the highly publicized "Delphi
Technique" and other, more sophisti- cated procedures. A new system,
especially suitable for institutional analysis, was developed during the
course of this study in order to hypothecate mensur- able "peace
games"; a manual of this system is being prepared and will be sub-
mitted for general distribution among appropriate agencies. For older, but
still useful, techniques, see Norman C. Dalkey's Games and Simulations
(Santa Monica, Calif.:Rand, 1964).

SECTION 8

1. A primer-level example of the obvious and
long overdue need for such translation is furnished by Kahn (in Thinking
About the Unthinkable,p.102). Under the heading "Some Awkward
Choices" he compares four hypothetical poli- cies: a certain loss of
$3,000; a .1 chance of loss of $300,000; a.01 chance of loss of
$30,000,000; and a .001 chance of loss of $3,000,000,000. A government
decision-maker would "very likely" choose in that order. But
what if "lives are at stake rather than dollars?" Kahn suggests
that the order of choice would be reversed, although current experience
does not support this opinion. Rational war research can and must make it
possible to express, without ambiguity, lives in terms of dollars and vice
versa; the choices need not be, and cannot be, "awkward."

2. Again, an overdue extension of an obvious
application of techniques up to now limited such circumscribed purposes as
improving kill-ammunition ratios determining local choice between
precision and saturation bombing, and other minor tactical, and
occasionally strategic, ends. The slowness of Rand, I.D.A., and other
responsible analytic organizations to extend cost-effectiveness and
related concepts beyond early-phase applications has already been widely
re- marked on and critized elsewhere.

3. The inclusion of institutional factors in
war-game techniques has been given some rudimentary consideratin in the
Hudson Institute's Study for Hypo- thetical Narratives for Use in Command
and Control Systems Planning (by William Pfaff and Edmund Stillman; Final
report published in 1963). But here, as with other war and peace studies
to date, what has blocked the logical extension of new analytic techniques
has been a general failure to understand and properly evaluate the
non-military functions of war.